http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXdcYO9sBws&feature=rec-LGOUT-real_rn-2r-4-HM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWdM6bHkBYo&feature=related - What roadname is that on the first unit?
These aren’t my videos, but I ask this question because, I’ve never seen those types of Spine Cars before. They look different. Does anybody know what type of 5 Car Spine Sets they are? Also, nice variety of Trailers on both Trains.
The video is a bit blurry, but the best I could tell, the first video, they look like full flat cars that are articulated into 5 unit sets, not spine cars. Maybe something like this?
PS: On the second video, the lead unit is lettered “StL&H” for St Lawrence and Hudson. Use the “Pause” button on the video to get a better look at it.
Well, first of all, they’re not “Spine Cars”. They have a full deck that allows the trailers to be circus loaded/unloaded. (A truck tractor backs the trailer up a ramp on to the flatcar and secures it to a hitch on the car.)
That’s CP’s Expressway Service between Montreal and Toronto. At around 340 miles, it’s one of the shortest, if not the shortest, intermodal lanes in North America. The cars were special built for this service. Has this service been successful against trucks? Well, CP still runs it (AFAIK) but they haven’t expanded it to other markets. If I still worked in intermodal marketing, which I don’t, I’d like to see what could be done with similar equipment on a Thief River Falls, MN/Twin Cities/Tomah, WI/Chicago service. (CP all the way!)
Basically, the equipment is the end result of a competition staged by the AAR in the 1980’s to develop a “High Productive” intermodal train. New York Airbrake (Now folded into Westinghouse) came up with the concept of articulated flatcars equiped with trailer hitches every 30’ (or something like that). This hitch spacing wo
is 2 mins. 44 secs. long - the train really shows up at about 0:48, and continues to the end.
is 2 mins. 13 secs. long - the train shows up at about 0:37, and continues to about 2:05. The tank trailer at about 1:20 is different, but the crossing gate arm to the left, and the brush and backlighting to the right, make it very hard to see details of the cars.
What I’ve really wanted to see for a long time is a photo sequence or video showing how the internal flatcar ramps are ‘detached’ and separated for loading, and then reconnected. I presume that it would be similar to a typical detachable goose-neck ‘low-boy’ trailer that’s used for hauling heavy construction equipment. But if I correctly understand the post by greyhounds, those ramps are no longer used - are these cars now loaded with the usual intermodal terminal ‘PiggyPackers’ or portal cranes or straddle cranes, etc. ?
Nope. Part of Knorr-Bremse.
Paul,
AFAIK, they still load/unload using the built in ramps. What they never used was the self-propelled car concept. Somewhere I’ve got a video of this thing. I’ll try to dig it out.
That dry bulk “Tank” trailer would have been hard to lift but easy to “ramp”.
I never really understood the advantage of the self contained ramps. We had portable TOFC ramps that could secure to a flatcar’s trailer hitch and be moved around a terminal by a yard tractor. I would have just used 3 or 4 of the portables and not messed with putting ramps on some of the cars.
That full steel deck is needed to allow the circus loading/unloading. Now if I could just figure out how to do circus with a conventional spine car I’d have another idea that wouldn’t play in Calgary.
Calgary is a great city. It’s the only place I know where you can take light rail to a rodeo.
Ken