"Success has a thousand fathers. Failure is an orphan."
Years ago I was part of the small group of young engineers looking for better ways for non-ballasated track in tunnels and on structures. Long before internet, this meant searching by other methods. We were fortunately near the US Department of Transportation Library. A good bit of time was spent there researching past methods used. There were multiple variations of fasteners used between rails and concrete in the 1900 to 1930 time frame. Research in transit work related systems fairly well completely stopped with the start of the Depression, and by that time, early 1970's had barely started back. We ran across several good sounding concepts in available technical literature that were installed in various test sections on various transit and railroad systems throughout the country. For several of these there would be glowing reports about their performance for a couple to a few years, then thundering silence. We realized fairly soon that there had to have been some failure that was regarded as terminal, but had no idea what, because no one talked about it, at least not in the technical publications. Was it the concept or a detail that could be overcome? Fortunately, we had one old guy in our group that did very little work (he tended to enjoy a liquid lunch) but was able to answer some of these questions. More than once, when his brain was unpickled, his memories would save us days of research. One in particular trackform that I remember sounded good, but then silence. He told us this about it, they had a derailment on it so the Chief Engineer told them to rip it out completely. By the way, that was the right answer, as it did have some deficiencies in concept.
