I want to model intermodal. From my search, it seems that HO Scale is where you can find the most intermodal well cars and containers. But, I wanted to verify. After that question, what model intermodal car maker do you folks prefer the most? And, what would be the minimum curve size I would need to reliably run the cars? Thank you!
I have quite a few intermodal cars in HO scale. The majority are 53’ and 48’ with a few 56’ and 40’ thrown in. I do like the Kato 3 car sets. They are heavy (made with some type of metal) and run well. The latest Walthers intermodal cars are nice and heavy as well. Athearn are good, but need some weight to them. Atlas (at least the ones I bought) are plastic and need to be weighted down. I just purchased my first sets of the Athearn 3 car spine units. They’re made with metal and seem that I’ll have no issues running them.
My containers vary, I buy the names I like and when I double stack, I keep them to the same manufacturer.
On my layout the cars run on 24" minimum in certain areas. Other areas I have 26" - 30". Of course the wider radius the better they will look on your layout.
Good luck in your pursuit!
Neal
In all of my containers I add 1/4oz weights to the bottom container, usually about 4-5 pieces.
Neal,
Thank you for the reply! I do have other Kato power and cars, so their well cars would work best for me. Can I use a different maker’s containers in a Kato well car? It seems that Walthers has the most containers available.
I appreciate the advice on curve size and using weights.
Thank you again!
John
Ed
Hi John,
You can use any type container you like. I would check some of the online dealers like modeltrainstuff.com or trainworld.com for other containers available, as well as ebay. The only suggestion I made would be to use the same brand when you stack two containers together. Despite the ‘universal’ pin and hole placement, I’ve found some don’t quite line up correctly.
Neal
Intermodal, speaking specifically about containers, has several distinct generations. Your selection of models, and in turn what to buy, is tied to what generation you’re looking at. Assuming that’s something you want to worry about or not.
For instance, the 28, 45, and 48 foot containers have all but vanished in the 2010-2021 window. Even the 20s aren’t as common as they once were, at least outside of the immediate area around ports. With them, the 48’ and 56’ wells have disappeared. International settled into the 40’ container and domestic is overwhelmingly 53’ containers, so 40’ and 53’ wells dominate. I don’t even remember the last time I saw a 48’ well. The 57’ spines have become less common (TTX’s website doesn’t even mention them any more) and the 89’ flats are an endangered species.
Intermodal railroad equipment has been around since at least 1884, when the Long Island Railroad transported wagons on their trains.
And it has changed a lot since then.
Saying “I want to model intermodal” is almost as broad as saying “I want to model a railroad.”
Do you want to model that Long Island operation? Or perhaps the New Haven in the fifties? Or what you see when you walk down to the tracks wherever you live?
Might want to be more specific, especially when you then ask after appropriate equipment.
By the way, hauling trailers on flat cars is “intermodal”.
The photo I posted above is “intermodal”. Those are 20’ containers on an 89’ flat.
I recommend educating yourself on intermodal modeling. Far better than coming here and hoping you ask the right questions and get the right answers is a book:
Jeff Wilson’s “The Model Railroader’s Guide to Intermodal Equipment & Operations”
It very much should be updated, but except for that, the book is very much the best way to learn about modeling intermodal.
Jeff Wilson has also written “Piggyback & Container Traffic”, which I presume is about the prototype only. I’m sure it is also very informative.
Once you have read these and know something about the subject, THEN is the time to come back and ask questions like:
Do those special 56’ well cars still run? Do they still carry 28’ containers? If not, what do they do?
What do I do when my Intermountain containers are too wide to fit in my well cars?
Ed
I bought three Walthers Mainline 53’ well cars I like very much. Proto couplers are nearly as good as Kadee. Metal bodies track nicely. They come with coupler bars taped inside the packaging if you decide to run them as a coupled unit. I don’t recall if they’re numbered as a unit of A B C.
I bought a set of five articulated well cars also Walthers Mainline I do not like quite as much. They don’t run well as a five car unit due to the articulated common trucks on anything under 24" radius.
Containers vary a lot and they don’t all have correct pins and sockets which is really disappointing. Surely model railroads should use universal mounting pins and sockets. After all the prototype does. Rapido’s are very nice. Walthers are generally good. Kato makes excellent containers.
I play just a little loose with the timeline for Trailer-On-Flat-Car service, and use equipment of a style that was not wide-spread for a few years on my 1954 STRATTON AND GILLETTE.
-Kevin
Might depend on where you live. I see tons of Crowley 45’ containers running around Florida these days. Looks like they are making big investments in that size:
45’ boxes have never been all that popular. But they were certainly around in 2015. I noticed that Hyundai has been pretty big into 45’s, while Evergreen not so much. I’m doing a Hyundai “train”, and an Evergreen; and I expect to go 10% 45’s on the Hyundai, and maybe 2% for Evergreen (one, maybe two).
I think the 28’s were a UPS experiment that wasn’t all that successful. The special 56’ well cars were made just for them. After a few years, the cars were released into the general population.
Now the 48’s. Those might very well be goners.
Ed
Nice lookin’, Kevin! Very railroady.
Ed
Is that, perchance, the Thrall 5 Unit Rebuilt 40’ Well Cars? I recently got a set of those and they track horribly. They look OK for the price and are nice and hefty, but the connectors between the articulating cars fit poorly and bind up regularly causing derailments. This typically happens coming off a 30" radius curve into a straightaway. I need to try to lubricate that connection to see if it frees up the articulating motion. The wheels also don’t roll that well.
My Kato 3-unit 53’ articulated cars, on the other hand, are far superior in operation. They track beautifully and the articulating connections between the cars swing very nicely with no binding whatsoever. The wheels are also free rolling.
Even so, they’re not very common. They’re practically a specialty size for specific uses, in Crowley’s case for the Caribbean produce trade.
45’ containers CAN’T be very common, because they can’t be stored below decks. If they WERE very common, container ships would be built to different dimensions.
However. Just past the middle of 2010, which puts us in the “window”, I photographed a container train that had 19 40’ Hyundai containers and 16 45’ Hyundai containers. There were other companies present, but I’m just looking at the ratio of the two sizes shipped by Hyundai.
Pretty close to be equally represented, I’d say.
So if I want to model that train, and I do, I will keep this ratio in mind.
It’s certainly true that the ratio I note does not hold true in much of the rest of the industry, but it did in THAT train.
I have a few extra minutes before dinner still, so I checked into what I had from 2015, a lot more in the middle of The Window.
I checked an ocean intermodal train from August of 2015. I found 7 Hyundai 40’ and 8 Hyundai 45’. I also found serveral 45’s for both OOCL and NYK, plus one each for ZIM and TEX (I used to own a piece of TEX–did NOT get rich of of that).
I noticed that different carriers are different. Surprise. I found that Evergreen has 40 non-hi-cube boxes almost exclusively. I see a few hi-cubes, and very few 45’s and refrigerators.
A neat thing about Evergreen is that they haven’t yet stuck their web address on their boxes, so my collection is valid for decades. I’ve also got a bunch of Hyundai and Hanjin. THEY stuck their web address on their boxes, so I need a “before” set and and “after” set.
Ed
Thank you. I am pretty proud of my custom built T.O.F.C. fleet.
This is my latest addition.
-Kevin
Hey UCF Knight:
Sorry for not sending you a PM… when I clicked your name I did not get the “Start Conversation” button.
Are you in/near Oviedo? If so, are you planning on going to the Golden Spike Train Show in DeLand this weekend?
-Kevin
I watch a fair amount of Virtual Railfan’s La Plata cam, and specifically want to model modern-day mainline intermodal. 53’ containers are fine with me.
My layout (still under construction) was once planned to be 2008, because I have a 2008 ORER. Then I moved it up to 2011 so I could have NS and Amtrak heritage units.
Now I want to move it up to 2018 so I can have magenta ONE containers. Nothing on the road or rails stands out like they do.
As I said, I suggest you educate yourself with a couple of books. How’s it going with that?
I’m glad that 53’ containers are fine with you.
Ed