yep im the guy with 15" track. im limited to 43’ cars or shorter and i need some fresh ideas for cars and road names. some info: two locos, ATSF GP-40, ATSF switcher, 3 ballast cars, ATSF dump car, 35’ ATSF caboose. i want some lots of diversity in my cars and road names as it is in real life. just brainstorm and write doen all ideas. much appreciated! Anders
The standard AAR 40-foot boxcar was used by literally hundreds of railroads, and a lot of them lasted well into the diesel age.
One that would go nicely with your other equipment was the Santa Fe ‘route map’ scheme. They actually put a map of the railroad on one end of the car, with the big SANTA FE cross herald on the other. Other railroads had a variety of color schemes aside from the usual box car red.
Other short cars that showed up everywhere: 50-ton 2-bay hopper cars, short tanks, ice reefers (and early mechanical reefers), ‘standard’ flats. Early piggyback operations loaded a single trailer on a slightly modified flat car. The longer TTX cars didn’t appear until later.
Athearn ‘blue box’ kits were available for many different short cars. I don’t know how many are still in production.
Are you shure that you are limited to 43" cars, or can you do any bigger? do you have any longer cars you can test it with, or are you stuck? any possibility of even being able to get a bit more room to get even 18" curves? Some boxcars are only what 50", could that work. You could also try tank cars, and hoppers.
Glad to help.
alexander
I model the 1960’s, so my worst-case freight cars are 50-footers, and those are just a few flats and gondolas. Also, the engines were shorter back then, too. If you pick an earlier era to model, then the shorter cars will be perfectly appropriate.
to answer your question qickly look at my other post…
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=58258
The lifelike boxcars that i have are fitted with talgo trucks and can go around very tight curves. I read your other post, and i can see your perdicament. Have a chat to your mom and see if you can get just a tad of extra room, so you can get 18" curves, and then try. but if you are really stuck i am out of ideas, exept for this: If your parents know that this isn’t some here today gone tommorow thing then they might give you some more room, it happened to me.
alexander
Anders
There are lots of 40’ and under cars out there. The AT&SF directly interchanged with dozens of other RRs in the west and midwest, plus you could still see many RRs from the south and and east that brought specialized material from those parts of the country. Just to name a few types of cars you could use, open hoppers (all pretty much 40’ and shorter), gondolas, covered hoppers (shorter ones usually for dense products like sand or other minerals the RRs wanted to keep dry), short tank cars, flat cars, as mentioned already-boxcars, reefers, and stock cars for livestock.
Most if not all of the manufacturers have these cars readily available. Accurail, Athearn/Roundhouse, and Walthers makes some easy to build kits for many of them. Red Caboose, LifeLike, Intermountain, and Branchline Trains makes kits that are just a bit more time consuming, but not much. And most of them can be bought ready-to-run.
Hope this helps
Rick
Anders,
Look at the Accurail kits. They make a ton of boxcars and reefers in the 40’ range. (Course, since they’re a kit, you’ll have to put them together.) Accurail kits are fairly easy to assemble, have nice detailing, and are easy on the pocket book. I just love the detailing on the wood-end and wood boxcars.
Tom