What Is A Hot Axle?

…Roller bearing boxes gave much less warning and usually the first thing you knew, unless it passed over a HABD, was when the thing collapsed entirely. As they found out at Summit Tunnel http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/eventsummary.php?eventID=167 back in 1984...

Hot Box... much more common in the old days.

An old fashioned journal bearing relied on sufficient - and sufficiently good - lubrication, together with sufficiently large bearing surfaces, to run properly. Lubrication was often rather hit-or-miss. if you look at a typical perserved wagon, you'll see the axle box is in two halves, split horizontally; if you look very closely you'll see there's a small lift-up cap in the lower half, into which oil could be injected using a large syringe. There used to be locations (often loops where goods trains were likely to be recessed while faster trains passed) where there were oilers and greasers whose job was to go down each train with a bucket & syringe, filling the boxes with oil. It would also be done at major yards.

The advent of roller bearings brought an end to such things; bearings were henceforth grease-packed at works visits and that was it.

When you had a hot box with journal bearings, the first thing you usually knew was the smell. A bit later on, it would start to smoke; at this point you'd put in 7 bells ('Stop & Examine'and, after the hot box was confirmed, the train would limp forward to somewhere the offending wagon could be put off (there were a lot more little sidings etc in those days). Adrian Vaughan (I think) writes about all this; I only ever had one hot box to deal with, when I was at Junction Road http://www.signalbox.org/diagrams.php?id=706 and the offending vehicle was put in the Cripple Siding where it sat smoking merrily into the twilight. The wagon would be 'red carded' until the C&W Examiner (the 'Tapper', we still called them) had given it a look over and recarded it red & green - 'yard to yard for repairs'.

Roller bearing boxes gave much less warning and usually the first thing you knew, unless it passed over a HABD, was when the thing collapsed entirely. As they found out at Summit Tunnel http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/eventsummary.php?eventID=167 back in 1984...

As an aside, the hot steel coil trains running on the northern part of the WCML caused problems with spurious HABD activation when first introduced.

" said:

As an aside, the hot steel coil trains running on the northern part of the WCML caused problems with spurious HABD activation when first introduced.

Intrigued by this Tom. I'm not well versed in the production of steel - would this be some sort of time-restricted item that had to be moved whilst still warm? I remember reading (I think) a post from Pascal talking about some oil that had to go from somewhere in the south to Liverpool within a certain time or it'd solidify.

Was this - time restricted goods (beyond the normal "I want it there by then" stuff!) - a common occurrence on the railway way back when?

(Apologies for potential thread-jacking, WSM!)

A still existing example of liquid pig iron being transported on the railway can be found near Saarbrücken in Germany - since the blast furnace at Völklingen closed down and is now a World Heritage Site, all the steel for the steel works there has to come from the blast furnace at Dillingen, which is about 20 km away.

" said:

A still existing example of liquid pig iron being transported on the railway can be found near Saarbrücken in Germany - since the blast furnace at Völklingen closed down and is now a World Heritage Site, all the steel for the steel works there has to come from the blast furnace at Dillingen, which is about 20 km away.

For a period around 1969 there was a regular service of molten steel from Teesside to Consett while the blast-furnaces at Consett were undergoing maintenance. More details at http://www.traintesting.com/torpedo_wagon_tests.htm.