Pump the Brakes: Amsted Highlights IBEX at Railway Interchange

The IBEX Brake System

RAILWAY AGE at RAILWAY INTERCHANGE 2019: Amsted Rail showcased its IBEX™ Truck Mounted Brake System, its latest equipment in brake system technology.

The longtime supplier of trucks and related components to the freight rail market brought a full-size IBEX brake system to Railway Interchange to “highlight how our extra-light design delivers more payload, and how our optimal shoe-to-wheel alignment extends wheel life, to point out just two critical advantages,” said Gary Wagner, General Manager of Global Braking Systems.

Amsted noted that additional IBEX benefits include, among others, a versatile modular design for a longer life cycle, fewer moving parts, flexibility to handle narrow and wide gauge applications.

“The design intent was to make a modular truck-mounted brake, which is where we basically use all the same parts over a wide variety of tonnages and track gauges,” Amsted Rail’s Ryan Kepley told Railway Age. “We’ve accomplished this by going with the use of an air bag instead of the traditional piston, because with an air bag, travel forces vary, unlike a traditional piston.

“Another way we’ve accomplished a multitude of forces is there’s a wide variety of lever ratios for the IBEX and they can be changed as simply turning one of the levers around 180 degrees. As well, we’ve made a compact slack adjuster. With this, we’ve lightened the weight of the IBEX because there’s no need for anything to be bolster-mounted.”

In addition, Amsted also had on hand its GPS and sensors for monitoring wheel and brake health, as displayed here by Amsted’s Andrew Martin: