Bottom dumping railway hopper car

Abstract

Abstract A railroad bottom-dumping goldola car has open-topped side and end walls and an open bottom closed by one or more transversely downwardly swinging door or doors, and trucks which run on railroad track rails which are interrupted to form a space over a dumping location below the rails'' level. The car may itself have only one truck at one end, its other end sharing the truck of an adjacent corresponding car of a train of the cars. The car has longitudinally extending rails along its sides on the upper edge of the frame which run on supported horizontal series of rollers supporting the car while it traverses the space between the interrupted rails, and the body''s swinging door or doors are swung open and shut on hinges, by an operating cam follower wheel journaled to the door in each case and running on a downwardly and upwardly contoured cam rail which spans the space formed by the interrupted rails, the cam rail defining a constant radius equal to the spacing of the hinge axis and the cam follower wheel. This gondola car features a rectangular frame defined by longitudinal sides extending along the car''s side for its length and transverse ends supported by the trucks, the frame defining an opening providing complete dumping clearance when the door or doors are opened. The frame''s ends are adapted for coupling to the ends of other frames of corresponding gondola cars to form a train via the common trucks, or in some instances, via the frames themselves, in all instances being made strong enough to carry the forces of jolts and tensions of train operations, preventing these forces from being transmitted to the car''s walls surrounding the open bottom. A number of the cars may be made up into a train of the articulated type, the adjacent ends of each two adjacent cars sharing the common trucks, thus providing for a greater length of open bottom and its door or doors than if each had its own two trucks.

Inventors

• 👤 Anders Bjorklund
• 👤 Bert Frelin
• 👤 Sven Scott

Bibliographic Details