A trash train

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A trash train

I don’t get it. What was trashy about it?

Steve, it’s a train inspired by container trains that run out of the Seattle area on a daily basis hauling containers of trash and garbage to a land fill site. Notice that some of the containers have a tarp cover, At the landfill site, the containers are put on trucks,(just like regular shipping containers that bring in all the stuff for your local Wal-Mart), and the trucks haul them up to the landfill, dump them, and bring them back, to be loaded back on the well cars, and back to the city for more garbage.

Mike.

Mike, what a great idea. I’ve always wanted to haul trash on my layout, because I model the 1980s and 1990s in upstate New York, when there were alot of unregulated construction and demolition debris landfills. While I don’t think the area and era I model ever used railroads to deliver C&D materials, you inspired me to put at least one trash container in my fictitious town of Chatham Junction, New York. Thanks for the inspiring video!

Thanks for the comments Robert. Trash trains started to get numerous in the 90’s, so model away! Just Google “trash train” or “garbage train” and you’ll get tons of ideas. I chose to model the West coast style trains because I already had a big selection of well cars, and containers. I looked into the specialized containers-on-flats that you see a lot on the East coast trains, but Atlas seemed to be the only manufacturer of those types of containers, and they are out of production, and hard to find. Re-purposed gondolas, and wood chip hoppers are also seen on trash trains.