Centuries-old brake echelons
At the Tikhoretskaya station in the Krasnodar Territory there is a monument on a pedestal - a steam locomotive, which in the epoch of the Victory brought and transported military cargo to Germany and Russia. Thousands of kilometers and thousands of hazards lurked trains at a time, as, indeed, now. Although today the hazard ratio is significantly reduced, there are plenty of problems on the railway track. One of them - the preservation of military goods.
In 1945, an unprecedented operation was carried out in Russia to transfer military units to the Far East: in a very short time, a huge amount of military equipment was transported along a single-track highway, and fighters were transported to four-axle heating cars to a new front. So four armies were delivered to the place of deployment: one tank and three combined arms. And this is just one small episode from the life of the entire railway network during the war years.
It is especially interesting how the military echelons were formed during the war. Little is still known about this; Information about the work of sorting stations has to be collected from various sources.
The compositions were formed mainly on the humps. The first such slide was built at the Rtishchevo station in Russia in 1899 year. Then these slides began to appear on almost all major railway junctions.
“During the Great Patriotic War, the stations worked with enormous voltage, providing military transportation, passing trains and equipment to the west, trains with evacuated enterprises and people to the east. An even system was built in 1942-1943 and the station became a two-way sorting station” - recalls the chief engineer of the South-Ural railway, MG Rodomanchenko in his book "Pages stories".
"Technical stations were the most bottleneck in the transport system. At that time, the number of wagons was about a day. The slides were limited to manual switch hands and braking of wagons; it took considerable time to prepare trains for disbandment" ("History of Russian Railway Transport" 1 volume, part of 6).
But, as in all history, there is an amazing detail that has survived to the present day. Rather, it is not a detail, but a mechanism - a “shoe”, the use of which began in the nineteenth century, and then in the twentieth century, and continues today. His age is not over. But it is precisely this simple and artless device that is used when braking wagons carrying combat in those distant days. weapon. However, the "shoe", as already noted above, is used today.
On the hill, cars are braked with the help of two devices - the beam moderator (its predecessor, the tick-borne car decelerators, was created in the 1930 year) and the usual "shoes". The first shoe appeared 157 years ago. It was created by German entrepreneur and inventor Heinrich Büssing in 1857. This device became the basis for all subsequent models of shoes that were made of wood, metal, with different types of rivets, double-breasted or single-breasted. The essence of the shoe, laid down by Bussing, has not changed in our time: a handle, a skid, into which a wheel, a shoe, rolls, and then rests. That's all.
Subsequently, Büssing will invent freight and passenger cars, will create a company of the same name, which over time will merge with another company and will manufacture cars under the brand of MAN. The German inventor will stop paying attention to the problems of railways. Highways and what moves along them interested him most of all.
Beam moderator consists of two parallel metal lines, which, when entering the car, compress the wheel rim from two sides. A beam moderator cannot provide a 100% guarantee of the safety of goods, therefore, it is mandatory to apply "shoes" when braking. It is rather difficult to control the shoes, firstly, because they are quite heavy and this six-kilogram device needs to be faked and thrown under the moving car (sometimes the weight of the shoe reached 16 kg). Therefore, the profession of switchman is considered to be one of the most dangerous on the railway.
"During the war, the switchmen worked mostly women. Each of them had, in addition to the constant transfer of the hands during the maneuvers and the reception and departure of trains, several other switches on which it was necessary to lubricate and fix the bolts, as well as to completely clean them. There were no radio stations on train and shunting locomotives. It was difficult and difficult to work on the roller coaster, when there was no lighting, no radio communication or loud-speaking notification. All maneuvering and sorting work was performed according to sound signals "(Elena Kryukova," ortirovochnaya station Orekhovo-Zuevo ").
In the post-war period, in the era of Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev, the problem of fixing wagons and trains on the sorting paths was not completely resolved.
A large number of emergencies took place on the marshall, where the formation of military cargoes for shipment to the destination, occurred, which could have been prevented by having modern equipment for braking cars and trains. Unfortunately, still in the world, the problem of leaving the trains from the station tracks has not been solved, and the fate of the Russian inventors who solved this problem is unenviable.
However, everything changed when Ignatkin Vladimir Ivanovich took up this issue. He had a lot of experience in creating military equipment: after graduating from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, he worked in the legendary design bureau, which created the T-34 tank in Tagil, was deputy general designer at the Rostov Research Institute (created radio communications equipment for Baikonur); has several copyright certificates, Russian and foreign patents. Including related to military equipment.
Based on his experience, Vladimir Ivanovich finally solved the centuries-old problem of railways and created a device that resembled the T-34 tank in appearance. And it can be said that in Russia the problem of fixing wagons and trains on station tracks was decided a long time ago. But the development of a scientist on a network of roads was not widely used because its development and implementation began in the perestroika and post-perestroika years, when the state allocated funds to support innovative developments.
Today, the scientist is retired, and his creative legacy, except his family, turned out to be unnecessary. However, this fate befell many Russian scientists who were born in the Soviet Union, and lived during and after perestroika. Then time was breaking the soul: there was nothing left of a person, except for the thirst for money and profit. But I believe that someday we will unpack several cardboard boxes, and the works of a military scientist who has been working on the problem of preserving military cargo along their route will be useful to someone.
The fate of a scientist in almost any country of the world is unenviable because it is anyway, but it affects the life and work of many structures and organizations that are used to working according to their own routine. And this routine evolved over the years, and even centuries. And when they try to offer some innovative ideas to replace it, this inevitably leads to a change of foundations. Therefore, innovations find their way very, very hard. It is necessary to have a considerable share and character and mind to deal with all the difficulties that arise along the way. Be a fighter to the end. But then who will take this place? Who will continue the work begun? After all, the problem is not really solved.
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