Improving the Reliability of Railway Automatic Couplers Under Track Geometry Deviations

The increasing need to ensure safe rolling stock operation warrants an analysis of the criteria leading to failures and breakdowns during both use and downtime. Ensuring trouble-free coupling of rail cars is one of the railroad priorities. This applies to both coupling of new cars and prevention of spontaneous uncoupling of rolling stock cars. Due to the non-ideal nature of tracks, namely, availability of curved sections in both horizontal and vertical projections, the axes of the automatic couplers are likely to diverge. Despite the developed railroad maintenance regulations, the reach of the car dimensions is not always correctly assessed, resulting in irreparable consequences. This paper proposes a method for improving the reliability of automatic coupling devices due to the implementation of various guide centering systems.