Hi Frank zstripe
Do you know of any drawings or photos of the ramp and loading end? It would be great to know the dimensions…
Hope you are enjoying your retirement!
Barry
Hi Frank zstripe
Do you know of any drawings or photos of the ramp and loading end? It would be great to know the dimensions…
Hope you are enjoying your retirement!
Barry
Also… I’m sure I read an article back in the 60’s of trailers that had tires but also railroad wheels that were dropped down to ride on track. These trailers were then piggy backed to make up a train. Was this true or did I dream it?
Thanks
Barry
Apparently not…
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1281031
…hopefully someone will come up with a better picture and info.
Cheers, the Bear.[:)]
My remembrance is roadrailers peaked in the 80s NS ran full trains of them. Containers have apparently wiped them out as the railroad wheels were dead weight on the highways. There was another version where one rail truck was used To connect two trailers as I recall.
Yes Roadrailers. I am sure there was an article in MRR. I have the archive but can’t find it anywhere. I would have thought the weight of the rail truck on the back would have been really prohibitive. All that weight to lug around and limiting the weight that could be carried inside the trailer. Thanks for the picture btw.
Barry
Hi Barry,
Well I don’t have exact dimensions for the ramps…but You can wing it…The width of a flat car and 50’s to 70’s trailers were limited to 98’’ in width. The length would be roughly as long as the equipment being loaded was, making sure the rear wheels, whether single or tandem had enough length on the ramp, so they were perfectly flat, before approaching lip of flat car.
In Bear’s link…the C&O was the Railroad in the 60’s who developed the concept of the Roadrailer…but it fell out of favor due to the added weight of the steel wheels and equipment they needed to run the rails. That is also true of the redesigned use of Roadrailers, they also fell out of favor, again, due to added weight and are almost exclusively used in dedicated service. Railroads don’t have weight restrictions on trailers running the rails…but all states have load limit restrictions on their roads and bridges, therefore, You could not put the weight on a Roadrailer and be profitable to deliver the load…they were just too heavy.
Here is a link You may enjoy reading and when You get to the site…scroll down to ‘’ Scraphaulers’’ post and in there You will find many clickable links, with pic’s of a lot of Railroads who used Roadrailers, many surprises.
Thanks for the well wishes on retirement…It’s been great, for the past 14yrs…hope I have another 14…will be 73 this year.
http://indianarailroads.org/board/index.php?topic=15419.40
Take Care! [:D]
Frank
EDIT: I should mention…they also redesigned the Roadrailers, so they do not have any steel wheels on them anymore…they sit on railroad trucks…but again they are used mostly in dedicated service. Had a friend that used to be the crane operator that only loaded Roadrailers and He said they were a pain in the buttocks, to get together.
P.S. How far are
50’s era piggyback is one of my primary modeling subjects, and my father worked in the trucking industry in that era, and worked for the SOUTHERN railroad in their piggyback operation in the early 60’s.
A few general thoughts:
Cranes - fixed track or rubber tired, piggy packers, and such did not become common place until the very late 60’s and early 70’s.
Jockey tractors with two steering wheels, while rare, were used by a number of railroads.
Jockey tractors with half cabs and hydraulic fifth wheels were then and are now common in the trucking business - with or without the railroad connection. They include other features like different steering rates and slow speed gearing to make precission backing, even for long distances, very easy for a skilled driver. Many such tractors will not go over 25-35 MPH in any direction.
As piggy back traffic increased, railroads did build specialized yards with multiple short tracks to reduce the number of cars loaded from each ramp. This obviously speeded the loading and unloading process.
Piggy back flats continued to have bridge plates well into the 80’s as many small terminals still used circus loading/unloading.
In the 50’s trailers were typically 35’ max, 40’ trailers were not legal nation wide until '57 or '58?
The fifth wheel “hitch”, invented late in '55, did not come into wide spread use until 1958 or so. But well into the 60’s you could still fine trailers jacked and chained to flat cars.
While rarely modeled, a measuable percentage of early piggy back flats that carried a single 32’ or 35’ trailer were only 40’ long. A number of railroads used underframes from obsolete 40’ box cars to build such cars in their own shops.
The creation of TrailerTrain quickly brought standardization to the equipment and ended all the custom flat cars made in railroad home shops.
Different railroads saw piggyback in different
Hi Frank
Thanks for all of that! Excellent info.
Manchester? Long way unfortunately. I am way down on the south coast in Hampshire near Portsmouth. And now I’ve retired (best thing I ever did and also with a great pension btw) I don’t travel anywhere near there.
Thanks again! And take care…
Barry
Hi Sheldon
Thanks for all the excellent information. I shall now digest!
Cheers
Barry
Barry, you are most welcome. Feel free to address me with any additional questions you may have.
Sheldon
If you really get into operational considerations of TOFC, don’t forget the various intermodal “Piggyback Plans” that were around back in the day, as discussed in this thread (wherein Greyhounds expresses his appreciation for ICC regulations [:P]). For a slightly more structured discussion, this Google Books excerpt from “Practical Handbook of Industrial Traffic Management” (1987, but it reads more like it’s from 20 years earlier) could be interesting.
The only real effect I could see those plans having on a layout is the ownership (and names) on the tractors, trailers, and TOFC rolling stock.
Another type of TOFC operation where the trailer rode on a “track” was the Clejan system as employed by the New Haven and Southern Pacific in the late 1950s/early 1960s. The trailers were equipped with very small diameter flanged wheels between the rubber-tired road wheels that used a raised center sill on the car for guidance, and support during transit. This system died an early death for obvious reasons. To use the cars, any trailer had to be equipped with the Clejan wheels and, the entire American trucking industry was not about to retrofit hundreds of thousands (millions?) of trailers, to interface with their most fierce competition!
I did not see a direct reference to NYC’s flexi-van service, but here are some links to check out:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jnos363/5082152589
http://rrmodelcraftsman.com/reviews/cm_extra_walthers_flexivan.php
I dont think that Walthers produced the 6th wheel Yellow tractor (called a Commando by NYC). They did make the Flexivans themselves and possibly the trailer bogies. Check out this thread for an idea on how to kitbash the commando: