Product Description
Abex Corporation, operating through its American Brake Shoe & Foundry Company division (later American Brake Shoe Company), allegedly manufactured a family of high-friction composition (“Cobra” and successor grades) railroad brake shoes engineered for the higher horsepower, higher speed, and heavier trailing tonnages of the post-World War II diesel-electric era. According to publicly filed U.S. asbestos personal-injury and wrongful-death litigation, these composition shoes replaced the earlier cast-iron and phosphorus-iron railroad shoes on many road locomotives and freight cars because composition material delivered a substantially higher and more stable friction coefficient across a broader temperature range.
Plaintiffs allegedly identified Abex Cobra and successor high-friction composition brake shoes on EMD F-, GP-, and SD-series road locomotives, ALCO and Fairbanks-Morse road units, freight-car AAR standard trucks, and passenger-car trucks operated by Class I railroads across the United States. Publicly filed litigation records allegedly reference these composition shoes as distinct from — and coexisting alongside — the “Comet” branded shoes referenced elsewhere in the Abex product family.
Workers Exposed
According to publicly filed U.S. asbestos litigation, workers allegedly exposed to Abex Cobra and high-friction composition locomotive brake shoes included railroad car repairmen (carmen) working on repair tracks, locomotive-shop machinists in diesel-electric backshops, rip-track laborers, and shop apprentices. Plaintiffs allegedly described brake-shoe change-outs on freight cars and locomotives that involved knocking worn composition shoes free from shoe keys with a hammer, catching a rain of brake dust and worn friction chips beneath the truck, sweeping accumulated dust from repair-track pits and shop floors, and occasionally hand-grinding or fitting shoes at the shop bench. These tasks allegedly released respirable chrysotile fibers into the worker’s breathing zone.
Bystander workers — engineers and firemen performing running inspections, hostlers moving units, carmen working adjacent cars on the same repair track, and machinists working overhead on running gear — allegedly inhaled fibers dispersed by brake-shoe work performed nearby. Class I railroad shops from the Midwest to the Gulf Coast allegedly cycled through Abex composition brake shoes on a continuous basis tied to car-repair and locomotive-maintenance schedules.