This page is dedicated to the documentation of one particular piece of my rolling stock; my Freight Container Cars. I've heard this type of car referred to as a Spine Car as well. Basically, it is a series of flat cars, which share a common set of wheels between flat car beds. In my case, the car bodies have been built to carry the boxy Freight Containers from the 4549 Road 'N Rail Hauler.
The first version I built had three body sections, which means there were two sets of "end trucks" (two axles, buffer and coupler), and two more "middle trucks" (two axles, and two 2x2 swivel plates). You would have an "end", a body, a "middle", a body, a "middle", a body, and an "end". I later extended this version to have 6 beds, in preparation for an appearence at the SuperTrain 2001 show in Calgary, Canada.
In most of the photos here, the car does not have the hinged side walls along the length of the car bodies which were in my original sketches. But you can put some 1x2 tiles in the right spots on the body parts, and this will help keep your containers on the cars. In the original design, there was a 1-stud gap between the ends of the freight container loads and the end wall of the bed. It turns out that the 1x2 tiles don't do much to hold the containers on the bed, and double-stacked loads could toss the upper load, if not both levels around curves at high speed.
I hadn't taken the time to try to redesign these cars before the SuperTrain show. While my trains were in Canada, Steve Chapple became inspired to come up with another design. (The new design shared a few ideas that I'd written down, but hadn't tried, as well as trying a couple of his own.) This stirred my interest in variations on the Intermodal Freight theme, where I bought a couple good books, some decals, and I made some time to try new ideas. This resulted in the phase 2 design, and then my homework encouraged the changes in the Phase 3 photos.
My favorite reference book for intermodal freight is Intermodal Modeler's Guide - Volume 2 (Randy Lee, Highland Station Inc., ISBN 0-9655365-2-1), which seems to be a favorite of the NMRA. (If you're an NMRA member, you may be able to get this at a discount through NMRA.) This book shows a few types of spine car trains, and it shows many pictures of prototype (i.e. 'real') containers, trailers, and flatcars, as well as detailing how to modify certain HO- and N-scale model kits with various details. The accompanying text was also very informative. I bought mine at The Train Shop, in Santa Clara, California.
Photos of my Freight Container Car
(Images larger than 105 kb were taken with a Kodak DC-40 digital
camera. Smaller images are from photo prints, using a STORM
Technologies photo scanner.)
Phase 1 - the original design
Phase 2 - incorporating my planned modifications.
(Images captured with Canon PowerShot A70 camera)
Phase 3 - changes made after reading up on the topic.
(Images captured with Canon PowerShot A70 camera)
Now that I've tried to model the ideas that I had imagined, I've found some limitations. I tried a few other ideas, but I don't have the pictures on the computer yet. I've been trying to resolve the balance issues with the car-end trucks (since the normal attachment for the mid-body trucks doesn't work well on the ends), and I'll share some of those pictures in the future as well. Having done my reading after much of the experimentation, I have a few more ideas, but now I need to find the time to model the train car bodies, wheelsets, trailers and freight loads...
