edit: Solved. Thanks guys
In: Engineering
An interesting (I thought) aside – the air pressure holds the brakes off, and each brake has its own spring that is always trying to apply the brake. Then the air pressure from the control system is run to all brakes via lines. That way if there is a leak or some other failure where you loose air pressure, the brakes go on. I always thought that was a cool example of a ‘fail-safe’ design – where the design tries to predict a failure that is likely to happen, and defaults to the safest option.
*edit*: turns out this is misleading (unintentionally). I thought nearly all air brake systems worked this way, but it sounds like this is only in the case of the parking brake. See other comments below. Thank you to those who have taught me something here.
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