I guess I had too much time on my hands. I broke out the scale and started weighing my freight cars. Most, actually all were significantly under the MNRA specification for N Scale cars, so I started bringing them “up to spec” by adding lead weight over the trucks until they all registered the required number of ounces. I did about 4 cars and hooked them on to an Atlas RS-1, which is normally a good puller. It wouldn’t pull those 4 cars up about a 1 percent grade without the wheels slipping. I took the cars apart, removed the weight, and everything is back to normal. I guess if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…
I have tried to do it myself with HO, but I found the same thing they are just too darn heavy. I suppose the best thing to do is look for a happy medium. The only thing we really need to do is make sure they are heavy enough not to turnover on the curves under a heavy load(10 to 12 ) cars.
I forgot what NMRA standards are for HO, but my buddy who runs a train club gave a “rule of thumb” that he uses and it worked for me. 40 ft. car is 4 ounces, and an ounce for every 10 feet. As in anything in life , whatever works for you.
HO standard is 1.5 oz., plus .5 oz for every actual inch of car length.
40 foot car comes out to 3.75 oz.
50 foot comes out to 4.5 oz.
I have a board with a piece of track nailed on. Marks every 1 inch, with the weight recommened written on. Kadee gauge secured to one end. Unfortunately, it is one of the older gauges that has self destructed. The newer gauges are much better. I have two gauges loose that I can set on and do a quick check.
This past weekend I ran a 150 car ore train at the club layout. All cars weighted to NMRA spec, all kadee couplers. Run for hours on end with no problems. The club track is not the greatest[:(].
Small correction … NMRA standard for HO is 1.0 oz (not 1.5) plus 0.5 per inch.
Aha ! You too are realizing if you fill your boxcars with a lot of weight the engine will not pull them , many, many MR’s abandoned this idea of loading up cars with weights with great results, I used to load mine with coins for extra weight then had to dig them all out again with only a small amount of weight in each car, I don’t see the significance of nmra specs.
Yup…Many modelers have known this for years…Liked I said before RP20.1 is as out dated as wooden car kits with paper sides…[:0]
I weight my cars a little bit.
If the train stalls, out comes the helper. [4:-)]
Weighted cars work better in yards during switching. I have followed the NMRA standard and am satisfied.
I weight my freight cars 1/2 to 1 oz below the NMRA standard. With some of the passenger cars, I’m about 1/2 oz heavy. Everything seems to work okay.
RP20.1 recommends a total weight for model railroad cars based upon their length, so I’m not sure what the car’s composition has to do with anything. I started weighting my cars to this spec about ten years ago, and noticed immediate and significant improvements in tracking over a variety of trackwork.
Overweight cars will degrade performance, but in my opinion RP20.1 isn’t overweighting, it’s weighting correctly.
I try to weight ALL of my cars to the NMRA standard. The idea is that they should all weigh the same(depending on length). Usually this means about 1 - 1.5 oz will be added to the normal plastic car kit. U also use the ‘truck tuner’ tool to ream out the journals on the trucks and I replace all plastic wheel sets with metal wheel sets(either P2K or Intermountain). The result is very smooth running trains. We just had two weeks of open house at the club(DCC/metal wheels only allowed), and other than one low joint(fixed on the spot), and a few coupler failures - ALL of the trains performed great.
RLANDRY6,
You mentioned N scale and weighting the cars up to the correct ounces. The NMRA ‘RP’ is .15 oz plus .15 oz for each ‘inch’ of length. That calculates out to .95 oz for a 40’ box car, and about 1.2 oz for a 60’ freight car. Are you sure that you were using the correct table? Another thing you might want to do is tra***hose terrible MT plastic wheels and install ‘real’ metal wheels(Atlas has a set just for MT trucks). They really make a difference is this small scale.
Jim