Service Failures of Railway Materials

Service failures were known to occur even before ushering in of machine age but there was no proper understanding of the underlying phenomenon and at best the attempt to overcome them lay in redesigning the components merely by thickening those sections irrespective of poor quality
of material or inadequate sectional strength.
In the late twenties, however, with springing up of chemical and metallurgical laboratories and with better understanding of Fatigue phenomenon which is the chief fact or underlying a vast majority of service failures, greater interest was taken in the study of performance and failures of components in service.