Rail ‘black box’ for tests

Press, 21 May 1982, Page 4

Rail ‘black box’ for tests

PA Wellington A "black box” to record the speed and brake pressures applied during a rail journey will be tested on a locomotive, a Railways Corporation spokesman said yesterday. The device was still very much a prototype. “We are quite advanced, but we haven’t got to the stage of fitting it to all our locomotives,” he said. The Railways had ordered more boxes and they would be evaluated in various types of locomotive, which would almost certainly include the Silver Fern.

A board inquiry into last year’s Silver Fern crash at Waiouru recommended the

introduction of a black box for trains. The inquiry report, by Mr Robert Smellie, Q.C., was published on Wednesday. It said a black box to monitor speed had been under consideration for some time. The spokesman said the evaluation trials would help engineers determine the information they wanted the electronic device to record. While the box would mainly be used for speed and brake recordings, it could also be used for gathering information on other performance aspects of a locomotive. Some Railways locomotives are fitted with a mechanical speed-recording device.