
26 Air brakes and auxiliary retarders
26.1 PRINCIPLES OF AIR BRAKES
General background
It was as long ago as 1868 that the American engineer
George Westinghouse first patented his invention for
an automatic compressed air brake for railway trains,
which soon proved superior to other types of braking
system including his own earlier development of a
vacuum-operated brake. Although compressed air brakes
for railway trains were soon adopted in America and
many other countries, another one hundred years
passed before they appeared to any extent on railway
trains in Britain. The change from vacuum to com-
pressed air braking in fact coincided wit ...