RTRI REPORT Jul. 2006
PAPERS

Development of Long-Durable Lanterns for Freight Trains

Satoru HATSUKADE, Minoru NAGATA


  Every freight train operated at heavy-snow regions is equipped with portable taillights (lanterns) instead of red reflecting disks. The lanterns are merely durable for 30-hours with alkaline rechargeable batteries because the lanterns are of built-in of heaters for thawing. For long-distance trains, it is unavoidable to replace discharged lanterns with full-charged ones. We developed a new-portable lantern with high-capacity Li-ion batteries to alleviate such workloads. The batteries are durable at least three times longer than a current lantern even under a temperature of -20oC. In addition, the weight of the batteries is lighter and maintenance. In this paper, we describe the details of the lantern with the results of performance tests.


* Full papers of RTRI Report are written in Japanese.

Copyright (c) 2006 Railway Technical Research Institute