Sometimes if one of your well cars cannot fit a 53’ foot container on the bottom, you can use a 48 footer in it’s place and put the 53’ footer on top.
If you have one set of 3 Atlas 53’ Articulated Well cars, then 6 53’ footer containers be carried, (3 can fit in the bottom and 3 on top). If you put a single Walthers 53’ well car in front of that set, you can carry 2 53’ foot containers, (1 goes on the bottom and the other one above it). if an Walthers All-Purpose Husky Stack Intermodal car is used, then a 48’ container goes below and you can put a 53’ container above it.
A neat load I photographed was a fully loaded Thrall 5 x 40’ well car. 5 40’ boxes in the lower position. Natch. 53’ JB Hunt boxes on top on the ends and middle. And two more 40’s filling it out.
Thanks for all your help guys, I ended up buying a walthers 48’ canadian pacific container and got it today. Here it is loaded up in my christmas gift well car, surrounded by my other two christmas gifts. All of these are from my in-laws who got me back into modeling after i hadnt had a model train since i was a kid.
Just thought I would pass this info on to You…See those two (2) guides on the side of the well car set at the 40ft. mark? Well for a 102’’ wide container that are flimped out so the wider container will fit flush on the walls of the tub. At the 40ft. mark there are IBC looking tops that are welded to the container floor that the 48ft. container rest on at the 40ft mark. When You load a 40ft. container in that car the guides are flipped in and still rest on the welded on IBC’s in the well floor, even though it is a 48ft. well the 40 footer still sits on the IBC’s with a space on each end of the container. Each crane has a ground man that is responsible for doing those things and guiding the crane operator which really is His boss. Those loads are programed into blocks…each car whether it be a single car, three pack, five pack is considered a block. The programer programs the blocks and the hostler/spotter sets up the containers to be loaded as to how they will fit in the block. If that 48ft can on the bottom was in a add-on block, it would be loaded on top so when it reached it’s destination it could be picked off the top, rather than unloading the whole car to get at it. There is a lot more to setting up a Intermodal train than just putting cans on…they usually don’t always all go to the same place. The same goes for setting up chassis to unload a train…You can’t just put any chassis name there…They have to belong to the owner of the container, which will be marked in yellow railroad chalk,(by a good supervisor which all comunicate by radio all day long) some can use in- house chassis’, but not all. At CSX We were doing 3,000 lifts a day,(24hrs) with 35 spotters per shift, running around and five cranes and side loaders. Loading/unloading sometimes five to seven trains a day. It is a 12 track yard 10 live tracks 2 storage a mile & 1/2 long.
