In the past couple of years, Athearn came out with ready-to-run flat cars with 2 piggy back trailers sitting on top. My question is simple…did these cars travel great distances from their home road area or not. The reason I’m asking is that I model the New Haven in New London, Connecticut and wondered if a C&NW, Great Northern, or Rock Island flat car with piggy back trailers would have shown up in Connecticut. Obviously, I’m the president of my railroad so I can run just about anything through New London, Connecticut but I wondered what the prototype did?
Hi Mondo. Western Pacific’s hottest train was the Fruit Block, ran from California to Chicago non stop except for crew changes, using a mulitude of different carriers refrigerated trailers. Other trailer trains were the TOF (trailers on flats), another was the GGM (general merchendise)the later if memory serves me were broken up at major points and sent various roads all over the east coast.John
Mondo,
In 1937, the NH was the second RR to start modern TOFC service (“Trailiner”), patterned after the CGW (which started earlier that year). They used 17200-class 50’ flats (very close to the Athearn model) which could carry two 24’ trailers, which they used through up to 1952. In 1944, the 17300-class 54’ flats arrived, and these were also used in TOFC service as these could handle two 26’ trailers. By 1953, trailer lengths had gone into the 30’ and up range, so the NH decided to use 40’ flats, with one trailer per car. By 1956, the NH tried two 35’ trailers on a specially made 75’ TOFC flat (called a Clejan car), but that was a failure. In 1962, the NH ordered 89’ flats to handle two 40’ trailers.
So as you can see, the Athearn TOFC model is mostly correct for NH from about 1937 to 1952. During that time in American railroading, interchange of TOFC equipment was unheard of. The NH flats never left the home road during this era as they were in captive service between New York and Boston, Providence, and Springfield. So seeing foriegn road TOFC equipment is also unlikely at best in that era. It was really the coming of TrailerTrain in the mid-1950’s that saw other RR’s TOFC equipment on the NH…and they started with 75’ flats.
The NH had three west bound and three east bound “Trailiners” in 1953: BH-3, BH-5, BH-7, HB-4, HB-6, and HB-8. BH-7 and HB-8 were “Trailers Only”, and had special NE-5 cabooses labled for them.
By New London/Groton, the trains would have been timed as the following in 1953:
BH-3: 8:53pm
BH-5: 10:41pm
BH-7: 12:45am
HB-4: 9:56pm
HB-6: 11:40pm
HB-8: 3:10am
