Vacuum brake

The vacuum brake is a braking system employed on trains and introduced in the mid-1860s. A variant, the automatic vacuum brake system, became almost universal in British train equipment and in countries influenced by British practice. Vacuum brakes also enjoyed a brief period of adoption in the United States, primarily on narrow-gauge railroads. Their limitations caused them to be progressively superseded by compressed air systems starting in the United Kingdom from the 1970s onward. The vacuum brake system is now obsolete; it is not in large-scale usage anywhere in the world, other than in South Africa, largely supplanted by air brakes. In the earliest days of railways, trains were slowed or stopped by the application of manually applied brakes on the locomotive and in brake vehicles through the train, and later by steam power brakes on locomotives. This was clearly unsatisfactory, given the slow and unreliable response times (each brake being separately applied by a member of the train crew in response to signals from the driver, which they might miss for any number of reasons, and necessarily in sequence rather than all at once where there were more brakes than crew members, making emergency braking extremely hit-and-miss) and extremely limited braking power that could be exerted (most vehicles in the train being wholly unbraked, and the power of all but the locomotive's own brakes relying on the strength of a particular crewmember's arm on a screw handle), but the existing technology did not offer an improvement. A chain braking system was developed, requiring a chain to be coupled throughout the train, but it was impossible to arrange equal braking effort along the entire train. A major advance was the adoption of a vacuum braking system, in which flexible pipes were connected between all the vehicles of the train, and brakes on each vehicle could be controlled from the locomotive. The earliest scheme was a simple vacuum brake, in which vacuum was created by operation of a valve on the locomotive; the vacuum actuated brake pistons on each vehicle, and the degree of braking could be increased or decreased by the driver.