Detector car history and new developments

THE rail detector car is an assemblage of specialized test equipment mounted on self-propelled railroad cars and is used for the detection of all types of defects that develop in railroad rails. The story of detector cars should start a few years before there were any such cars. Before 1926, the railroads were faced with a serious and fast-growing menace to their very life: the breaking of rails. The source of this menace was the transverse fissure, a very thin crack which would start within the rail and develop outwardly until it caused the rail to break.