Freight car hand brakes - 4
10. Jemco wheel from the
early 1930s.
11. Klasing geared brake
with horizontal roof-top
wheel from the mid-1930s.
12. Klasing model 646
wheel.
10
11
12
Jemco Products Company
Jemco introduced a geared power hand brake in the late 1920s
(10) that remained unchanged until the 1950s. The basic design
of the Jemco wheel would be repeated by Universal with their
model M2049 (23) some 20 years later.
Klasing Car Brake Co.
In the mid-1930s, Klasing briefly offered a geared brake mecha-
nism with a horizontally mounted roof top wheel (11). The
advantage over the general practice of a vertically mounted
wheel on the end of the car is unclear. In 1936 Klasing intro-
duced a more conventional geared brake with an intricately pat-
terned brake wheel it designated model 646 (12). Similar wheels
with slight variations in the lacy pattern appeared throughout
the following decade (13). After World War II Klasing launched
its Power-Matic D1051 geared hand-brake with a fully rede-
signed wheel (14). Despite the movement toward standardiza-
tion in the late 1950s, Klasing’s model D1051 continued to be
applied to new equipment through the 1960s.
Miner – W. H. Miner Co.
Although most vertical brake wheels were 22 inches in diameter,
Miner gained some success with its 24-inch model D3202 wheel
launched in the early 1930s (15). The cast malleable iron wheel
13
14
15
13. Evolving pattern of
Klasing model 646, circa
mid-1940s.
14. Klasing model D1051,
mid-1940s through late
1960s.
15. Miner 24-inch model
S3202 – from the early
1930s.
MRH-Nov 2013
