Brake Shoe Cross Reference Chart

For those of you with an intense interest in brake shoes, including the standard 14-inch 3-3/8 inch wide, 2 inch thick shoes used on many locomotives, here is a handy chart showing common sizes and cross referencing Anchor, Cobra, EMD, and GE part numbers:

http://www.sctco.com/ABS-Matrix.html

If you are planning on buying brake shoes please make sure you are going to use them for a legal purpose like braking a locomotive.

mxdata, thank you for this chart and I will make sure not to use any brake shoes as door stops.

keep searching keep finding
1929th member to join this forum

They make excelllent paperweights, too.

Ages ago, when I was working as a conductor, we had a guy come around taking pictures of journal box covers-

What's next, air hoses?

Looking around at the collection of stuff I have stacked up in my office, some of these things are even heavier than brake shoes! If the cutaway fuel injector (from a very large diesel engine) or the cutaway of a small engine ever fell off their stands, they could cause serious injury. Terry's brake shoe collection probably poses less of a risk than my museum of broken diesel engine parts.

I've got a real interestin' subset of railroad artifacts-governor oil jugs !!!!

O.K., a brakeshoe by itself isn't very informative, but I can understand why Terry C wanted it. Sometimes, if you have a real interest in (& emotional commitment to) something, it's nice to have a relic, an object which -- though perhaps meaningless in itself -- means something to you because of its association with what you really want to remember. Think of the lock of hair in the locket! Or, for that matter, think why museums and art collectors want paintings that were actually painted by famous artists, and aren't satisfied with high-quality reproductions!
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Full disclosure time: I have a spike, a very rusty spike, that a friend found along a long-abandoned railway line. It looks just like lots of other rusty spikes, but I'm glad I have IT: if you offered to trade some other rusty spike for it, I'd probably refuse. I'd love to have some relic, even a rusty spike, from the "Rochester Rickety," the White River Railroad in Vermont, abandoned in the 1930s.