It might be a warm summer morning in the early 1950s on the Illinois Central near Clinton, Ill.; or maybe a cold January day along the Pere Marquette outside of Grand Rapids, Mich. There’s the sound of a fast-running steam locomotive in the distance … the railroad’s in a hurry with something today. Shortly an engine and an unusual 5-car train blast into town. Amazingly, as the special roars by, the rear car disconnects from the train! Brakes can be heard; the car and the rest of its train come to safe stops a half-mile down the line. You’ve just gotten a rare glimpse of a unique operation — the American Steel Foundries test train.
ASF’s rolling “service laboratory” was the culmination of years of research aimed at improving the operation of the trucks and brakes on freight and passenger cars, leading to the success of the company’s A-3 Ride Control freight-car truck. This research and development work dates back to the early 20th century, with the creation of a company testing lab equipped to simulate and design for the increasing speeds and loads encountered by freight-car trucks. Such lab-based work provided valuable insight, and some testing was done on instrumented freight cars to correlate that work in real-world conditions.
In 1931 the Chicago-based company put together a train of four loaded coal hopper cars, a caboose, three test cars, and a second caboose equipped with recording instruments. Chicago & North Western was the host railroad, operating the train at speeds up to 60 mph on the main line west to Clinton, Iowa. This train and its accompanying technicians were the company’s first version of a dedicated set of equipment for real-world testing.
A further step came in 1940 with the purchase of two standard boxcars. These cars were then fitted with glass windows in the floors to permit viewing wheel and truck performance at speed, and cranes and fixtures to permit loading heavy weights. State-of-the-art instrumentation was installed to measure and record speed, spring deflections, and vertical and lateral movements of the trucks and the carbodies. A 5 kW generator and batteries provided electrical power, and phone jacks throughout the cars facilitated communications among the technicians…