I don’t usually get involved in the scale aspect of our hobby, if it looks right then it is. But, I was on the Bachmann site over the weekend and I see they advertise their 20’ freight cars as 1:20.3. I now own 2 of these and as I have said elsewhere they are fantastic, but if they are 1:20.3 then the connie must be 1:18 or thereabouts. Took some measurements and with some rough calculations I find this:
Box car: 12" x 3 5/8" which is (roughly) 20’4" x 6’2"
Gon: 11 3/4" x 3 5/8" which is (roughly) 19’10" x 6’2"
Connie tender width works out to 8’1"
Is this right?, on the old Rio Grande would the loco be 2’ wider than the cars it was pulling, I think not.
I have to say that these small cars look fantastic behind the 1:24 C16.
Cheers,
Kim
[tup]
Kim, no matter what Bmann says the scale of there passenger and frieght cars are, they are 1/22.5, they have always been and until someone smashes the tooling and forces them to start afresh, they alway will be. They were being produced long before Bmann went into 1/20 and were developed specifically for the Big Hauler line. Bmann thinks that they can just stick a 1/20 decal on the box and just make it so, the truth is they are not willing to re-tool everything in there line to correct scale.
Exactly right. I’m bashing my fleet of B’mann rolling stock by increasing the size about 18% in all three planes to make them “look right” behind a Connie. I’ve also enlarged the cab and tender on my Annie to make it compatible with the Connie, which I believe is correctly scaled to 1:20.3 dimensions.
The “1:20.3” freight cars that Bachmann advertises are not 1:20.3. That’s a marketing faux pas on their part. They were developing those cars at their “usual” scale of 1:22.5 when their Shay hit it big and made 1:20.3 the latest craze. Instead of shelving the project, they simply relabeled these diminutive cars as “1:20.3.” They have since admitted they messed up, but for whatever reason, the name stuck.
They are models of small narrow gauge prototypes, so even if they were built to 1:20.3, they’d still be a fair amount smaller than the Connie. (More along the lines of B’mann’s original 1:22.5 “Big Hauler” rolling stock.)
Having said that, these small cars do work in 1:20.3, but only in certain circumstances. First, if you’re modeling a c. 1870 railroad. Early “convention” held that a piece of railroad equipment should be no wider than twice the gauge, so many early pieces were built no wider than 6’. By the mid 1870s, this practice began to fall by the wayside, but many of these smaller cars surived up until the turn of the century. What’s more, they rode on 20" diameter wheels, which is only 1" larger than what the wheels on those cars scale out to. (Note also–as cars were reshopped, the wheels would have been turned down to get rid of flat spots. 19" diameter is very plausible for one of these cars.) It would be reasonable to see a string of cars of those proportions running behind a 4-4-0 or early 2-6-0 like those that Bachmann offers.
The second scenario would be an industrial line. These cars would look great behind the 2-6-0 Industrial mogul or the 0-4-0T Porter.
One final comment–the box car, no matter what, is too squat for 1:20.3. The door opening is a mere 4’ 4" tall. A person would not be able to stand up in such a car, making working conditions difficult to say the least, but very lucrative for the chiropractor next door. Even the early box cars had a door height between 5’ 6" and 6’.
I take it you guys in the States don’t have the same trading standard laws that we have in the UK it really does have to do what it says on the box. If they advertised them here as 1:20.3 and they where proved to be wrong they could face large fines. These little cars are very well made and I read what you say, but I wi***hey would upgrade their ‘larger stuff’ to the same standards - metal detailing, body mount couplers, thin brass brake wheel shafts. As I said earlier I am happy to run them behind my C16 and my tenderised stainz - for which they where bought to serve on the mine line, when it gets built. Off to Francais on Wednesday to say non to le frogs legs, just for a week and see if I can find a railway shop.
Cheers,
Kim
[tup]
AMS 1:20.3 rolling stock goes well with the Bachmann Consolidation, but other brands, even Bachmann, are too small.
There seems to be a lot of latitude between manufacturers on what constitutes 1:20.3 scale, too. For example, I am just finishing up a Northeast Narrow Gauge 1:20.3 model of a Maine 2-foot boxcar and it is not as big as the AMS 1:20.3 cattle cars.
Even prototype narrow gauge lines had many different sizes of rolling stock because a lot of it was built in-house or by local contractors, so even if a model truly is 1:20.3 scale the prototype may have been significantly bigger or smaller than other items from the same genre.
Sorry for the late reply but I’ve been away from the layout for a couple of weeks.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a bunch of Bachmann cars that I use for day to day running and I think they are great their cars are good bang for the buck.
BUT, they are hardly 1:20. Below are a couple of shots of a Bachmann flat car next to a 1:20.3 Hartford kit car. I don’t mix the two types of cars in the same train because only then does the size difference really stand out.
I also have some shots of a bachmann boxcar compared to an AMS 1:20 boxcar if you are interested.
kimbrit Our trading standard laws are almost non existant here. In the States we can quite easily call a product something that it isn’t. For example we can call a variety of cheese a “Real” dairy product so long as it contains some real cheese…the rest is a horrible artificial cheese made out of vegetable oil. If the government allows us to do this with food, then something like a model is no big deal. These laws need to be changed but as long as big money is behind them, they will likely remain.
You may not realize this, however, the new AMS products were Bachmann’s design for entry into the 1:20.3 rolling stock. Bachmann released protoype intitial models and photos mid 1998 and the backout.
Also, the Bachmann Shay was MDC’s design, however, MDC back out and sold the rights to Bachmann.
The cars in question are not those shown in the photo above.
THey are SMALLER.
The one shown next to the ams car is the standard 1:22.5 Bachmann flatcar.
The cars in question are referred to as “20-foot” cars, which, in 1:20, they are just about.
But don’t think you’re getting a “deal” on full-sized 1:20 narrow gauge cars when you buy them!
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