Hi!
I’m new to this hobby. I’m building a micro layout, called Ataltic Electric, (see http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=59890) and, as I don’t have any piece of rolling stock, yet, I’d like to know the width of HO freight cars as well the height of boxcars’ floor as I need to build a loading ramp.
Thank you.
Ciao, Ivan
The easiest way to find out would be to buy a couple of cars and measure them. As far as I know, there are no set heights for cars. And some cars are wider than others, but I would say that they are about as wide as the ties on standard sectional track.
While the height varies , In our area some tunnels had to bo heightened to allow the newer-higher cars to pass thru, The width is the same. If that changed thousands of loading docks would have to be rebuilt. I agree with the last entry, buy a car or two.
The ARR has set clearance limits for every aspect of moving equipment. Double stack containers have caused the verticality limit to be increased a little. In the case of model trains your best bet is to get an NMRA gauge from a hobby shop. It will be invaluable in years to come. One of the features is a height and clearance gauge for loading docks that should help you with that one. The rule of thumb for parallel tracks which is what I think you are asking is 2" centers on straights and 2 1/2" on curves subject to the tightness. When you get up to 30" or so you can relax the 21/2" to about 2 1/8" Absolute minimum for clearance is 3" and 4" is usually considered the standard in HO. That distance is measured from the top of the lower track to the bottom of the overhead substrate not railhead to railhead.
Suggest you go to the NMRA standards pages. They include the loading and structure gauges (if I recall correctly)… they’re in the NMRA inf somewhere.
The gauges are standard for models so that you can run pretty much any model anywhere. Similarly the real thing worked to standard gauges (profiles) so that they knew what would fit (or not fit) where. This is why some cars have the ends marked “Caution Over Height Car”, usually on a white band across the top of the end … so that it will stand out clearly above normal height cars in the train.
Don’t forget that very long cars may undercut the inside of a curve at the middle of a car and overhang too much at both ends… especially on the extreme curves we sometimes use on model layouts.
The solution I use is an 89’ box car with a felt pen taped on each corner at one end and one each side in the middle. If these are adjusted to just touch the baseboard they tell you where the car body will run plus a small clearance gap of half the thickness of the pen.
Another source of load and structure gauges would be ARA and AAR. At one time each road published its gauges.
Um, just in case you don’t know…
The loading gauge is the maximum size of vehicle in all three dimensions that will fit through the normal structure gauge.
The structure gauge is the “hole” which runs all along the track that anything within the loading gauge will fit through.
Anything greater than the loading gauge is “Out of Gauge” and has to move under special conditions.
Any structure that is closer than the structure gauge has to have special attention. These are usually only temporary. Things like loading ramp bridges, water cranes and mail bag cranes cross between the gauges under fixed conditions for short periods top do the job their designed to do. When someone mves a car without removing a ramp there is usually a loud bang…
Hope this helps.
The NMRA standards page gives this info. But basically, and boxcar or flatcar floor should be about 1/2" above the rails and the loading dock should be about 3/4" from the centerline ofthe track.
Jim