Ok so my club is considering adding a piggyback train to its list of manifests, and I’ve always liked articulated spine cars, so my question is how many units did these things come in I know the usual variety is 3 or 5 but I read that SF had 10, I also read that even bodied cars naturally have an odd truck count which can make early detector equipment confused.
Would a good arrangement be, A end car, C car, C car, C car, B end car, drawbar (I know some “intermodal” equipment recieved drawbars), A end car, C car, C car, C car, B end car.
That would give a ten car unit (like the fuel foiler) but have an even number of trucks.
I have never heard of problems with detectors and the number of trucks. A detector counts axles. Even an odd number of spines will result in an even number of axles.
Not always true. For some reason unknown to me, the NS detector where we railfan will often give an uneven number of axles. So when you do the math, you end up for example with 86.5 cars. I’ve not paid a lot of attention to what type of train (unit, manifest, etc) but believe it has happened on all types.
The Santa Fe Fuel Foilers were the original spine cars. They were ten units each and ran in a train with ten groups for a total of one hundred trailers. They were assigned to hotshot trains which ran nonstop from Los Angeles to Chicago.
Eventually the design was changed to a lower number of units when they started running spine cars to other destinations because using a ten unit car loaded with only five or six trainers was a waste and negated the whole idea of being fuel efficient. Nowadays you can see them mixed into intermodal trains with flatbeds and well cars.
The model makers seem to have settled on five units per car. Your club should probably just go with that. By the way the end cars are numbered A and B for the end units with B being the brake end. The middle units are C,D, and E, with the C unit being next to the B unit and the other units following in alphabetical order.
The AT&SF 10-pack units were sort of the early prototypes.
3 and 5 unit intermodal units (spine or double stack well cars) are standard. Single unit well cars are also common, but spine cars seem to pretty much always be 3 or 5 unit sets. (Other than those experimental “FrontRunner” or “4Runner” single unit spine cars which didn’t really last all that long.)
Sets can either be articulated (adjacent unit bodies sharing a truck) or drawbarred (individual units permanently coupled as a set). Note that drawbars are used within a set - you don’t have two articulated sets drawbarred together.
Within a set, the entire set is considered a “car” with all the same number. Each sub-unit is individually identified with a letter. The middle units are not all “C” units, each unit has a unique number - B-C-A for a three-pack, B-C-D-E-A for a five-pack.
Those 10 pack fuel foiler cars fell out of favor fast…You could only load trailers on them. The newer designed spine cars are more versatile in that You could drop the hitch pull up pedestals on the car and load a container on them…even all containers so there were no empty cars…plus they were too long for some yards out east.
Athearn came out with a fuel foiler kit yrs. ago…I never used them, but built them. They were way too light and no where to add weight unless you used a weighted trailer all the time…
I recall someone saying the ATSF white Fuel Foiler 10-pack sets were limited to Santa Fe rails but this is the misinformation highway after all so not sure if that was true or not.
Back in 1985 I was driving from Bakersfield CA to Dallas TX and remember Interstate 10 paralleling a Santa Fe yard and was impressed by this long string of white spine cars - the only time I remember seeing them in real life. Shame I didn’t get some photo’s of them.
As I recall, Santa Fe sold their design to Itel, who did their Impack version of the Fuel Foiler and a number of railroads used it in various configurations such as 4 units, 5 units etc. There were some good articles in Rail Model Journal in the late 1990’s IIRC with photo’s and details on them. I believe Cotton Belt (SSW) rostered them and Trailer Train as well.
I have read that some of the Impack spine cars were modified in the early 1990’s to allow them to carry containers, but by far newer designs have become the norm, which are manufacture to carry longer trailer and containers both.
The D&RGW ran piggy pack trains in the mid-late 1990’s and the Trailer Train 5 unit Impack spine cars were among the consists, along with Front Runner spine cars, but mostly conventional 89’ piggy back flat cars were used.
Concor made a kit which was not terribly well engineered. Athearn has done a blue box kit version which was much better and you can still find them at train shows and on Ebay.
The Athearn spine is basically the Fuel Foiler/Impack type which are similar design. They do have a weight that fits in the spine and as far as I know, they track just fine.
Of course replacing the plastic wheels with metal wheels will add some weight and a weight in the bottom
IMPACK is a brand name, spine car is a generic term. Technically, all of the IMPACK cars are spine cars, but that is not true in reverse.
Some history of the spine car…
In 1978, ATSF designed and built the 10-unit Fuel Foiler, which was designed for 40’ & 45’ trailers and run strictly on ATSF, as they were not designed for interchange service. In 1981, Itel (FMC Gunderson) bought the design from Santa Fe and dubbed them “Impack” (Inter Modal PACKage). Itel sold the cars in various configurations, 3-, 4-, 5-, 8- and 10-unit configurations. ACF and Thrall also built similar designs. Aside from Trailer Train (reporting marks were UTTX originally, then TTLX on later designs), BN, SP, and SSW bought these cars. Additionally, they were now designed to handle 40’, 45’ and 48’ trailers. The later TTLX design cars were also able to handle 28’ pups. [Athearn and ConCor(?) have produced a version of the early car, which handles 40’ and 45’ trailers, UTTX.]
In 1987, the (NTTX) container-only, articulated skeleton car, came along as a five unit set, which is able to handle 20’, 40’, 45’ and 48’ containers. The builders of this design included Bethlehem, Trinity and Hyundai. [Alan Curtis produces a brass kit, which is limited in production.]
I have some of the Athearn Impact kits. They run ok but are pretty light so I always put them on the rear of the train. I also have several of the Walthers All Purpose Spine car kits which are better because they are metal and weigh more. I put them in the front.
I’ll have to come back to this subject thread at some point in the future when I can get my freight car inventory out and running. I have a few sets of these piggybacks, and impact cars, spines, etc that a fellowed detailed out and weighted etc,…bought the sets from him at Timonium show.
