armchair modeler Posted November 2, 2012 Share Posted November 2, 2012 I have recently bought an A-Line Thrall 5 well car articulated unit.Each well car is 40ft HO scale. Cars C D & E are marked DO NOT LOAD 20 FOOT CONTAINERS. However the sides of the cars are marked as if de-noting where the 20 ft containers should be placed to fit two in the well. Cars A & B have no such marking. Could anyone please enlighten me as to the loading conventions please? Armchair Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glorious NSE Posted November 2, 2012 Share Posted November 2, 2012 What's the car number and I'll see if I can look up the prototype restrictions for it? Older well cars tended to vary car by car (or at least specific build to specific build) - but it wasn't unusual to have the outer (A, B ) and inner (C, D, E) platforms with different restrictions. Some of that was due to load limits, A, B can often be loaded heavier than C, D, E as they effectively have an extra axle devoted to them. With a single 20' potentially being the same weight as a 40' you would overload it with 20's on the intermediate platforms. Later well cars put heavier duty trucks on the articulated joints to get around that so ones from the late 80s on have tended to be the same each well... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
armchair modeler Posted November 3, 2012 Author Share Posted November 3, 2012 Glorious NSE Thank you for your interest From the data panel on the B car DTTX 62152 NEW 7-85 CAPY 512000 LD LMT 102500 PER UNIT Does that help? From what you say, does this mean 2x20ft on A & B cars, with 40ft on the C D & E. Can I double stack 40fts on all units? Sorry. Novice! All advice gratefully recieved Armchair Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glorious NSE Posted November 3, 2012 Share Posted November 3, 2012 Thanks - the official AAR loading guide (Intermodal loading capabilities guide) is available as a free download from here: https://www.aarpublications.com/ (Bottom of the page in the middle) That confirms that the inner wells on cars DTTX62120 to DTTX62179 cannot take 20' boxes. So for that car the restrictions are: You can only load 20s in the bottom of the A and B wells. You can load 40s in any upper or lower position. You can load 45s or 48s in any upper position. If you want to load 53s you can only load them on A, B and D provided C and E have nothing bigger than a 40 on the upper position. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunshine coast Posted November 3, 2012 Share Posted November 3, 2012 Thanks - the official AAR loading guide (Intermodal loading capabilities guide) is available as a free download from here: https://www.aarpublications.com/ (Bottom of the page in the middle) That confirms that the inner wells on cars DTTX62120 to DTTX62179 cannot take 20' boxes. So for that car the restrictions are: You can only load 20s in the bottom of the A and B wells. You can load 40s in any upper or lower position. You can load 45s or 48s in any upper position. If you want to load 53s you can only load them on A, B and D provided C and E have nothing bigger than a 40 on the upper position. Thank you all for that .......one of those subjects which is quite simple prototype practice to follow but if not done right would stand out like a sore thumb.................. Regards Trevor........ Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
armchair modeler Posted November 3, 2012 Author Share Posted November 3, 2012 Many thanks to both of you for very helpfull responses. The AAR download is particularly useful as it has illustrations as well. From what I have seen so far, loading the containers correctly is akin to a game of Tetris. Again, many thanks. Armchair Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glorious NSE Posted November 3, 2012 Share Posted November 3, 2012 I think the reason that exists is because of those older 80s cars which all seem to be set up slightly differently! The modern ones are all a little more predictable. The big no-no which always stands out (to me at least!) is don't double stack your 20s, if you have a dig through the document there is only one single standalone well designed to take a load of 4x 20s - so unless you model that one-off prototype car it's not correct...! A nice oddity too is they list various CSXT (ex Sea-Land) Gunderson Twinstack cars as able to take 35's, that was a Sea-Land only bespoke container size that had been obsolete really since the 70s, but clearly there were still enough in Sea-Land's fleet in the early 80s to warrant ordering well cars with the capability! The thing that fascinates me is that it's still dutifully listed in the guide - despite the company that operated them long ceasing to exist, and the boxes themselves likely not having been used for a couple of decades! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adrian Wintle Posted November 4, 2012 Share Posted November 4, 2012 Remember too that, if the lower container is heavy enough, there might not be an upper container. Also, at least around here*, you tend not to get 53' containers loaded above 40' ones (it does happen, but it isn't common). The flows are different, so you tend to get 53s on 53s, and 40s on 40s. These days you don't tend to see anything other than 40' and 53' well cars and 20', 40', and 53' containers. 45' containers show up occasionally, but the 48' ones appear to be almost extinct. It is very rare to see 48' well cars or Twinstack cars, but I have seen the occasional one(s). Twinstacks do seem to be more common in the US - I've seen a couple in a NS intermodal recently. Spine cars carrying containers or trailers also seem to be more common in the US, I've almost never seen them in the CN intermodals. *CN main line through Toronto Adrian Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
pH Posted November 4, 2012 Share Posted November 4, 2012 Also, at least around here*, you tend not to get 53' containers loaded above 40' ones (it does happen, but it isn't common). The flows are different, so you tend to get 53s on 53s, and 40s on 40s. *CN main line through Toronto Out here on the We(s)t Coast, it's not uncommon to see longer containers loaded on top of shorter ones. I don't know exact sizes, but the overhang is quite noticeable. It always looks unstable to me - I feel the longer one should be on the bottom. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glorious NSE Posted November 5, 2012 Share Posted November 5, 2012 That's traffic, rather than restriction led though, and has changed (and will keep changing) over time. The original concept back in the 80s was that the (deep sea) shipping companies were paying the railroads to move their 40' boxes, and the tech allowed the railroads to pop a few 48's on top 'free'...(companies like APL realised this and started their own domestic unit train services based on similar principles, running unit trains moving their own deep-sea boxes plus some domestic traffic in 48s added on) As time went on and business grew the domestic business either outgrew or just had different business needs from the international one, so you ended up with 48' wells being built. Now you have 48' wells you can now stack a truck-equivalent 53' on top 'free' versus a 48 so they started to become popular through the 90s - eventually you start running out of room on top for 53's and have to start ordering wells that size - once you do that then 53s quickly overtake 48s as the defacto standard. When I visited back in 2000 48s were fairly common, they are now virtually extinct as Adrian noted! As you get post millenium there's a big upswing in imports, and the market gets more and more specialised into needing 40' wells for deep sea traffic and 53' wells for domestic, there's also a sudden capacity crunch so filling a 48 or 53 well with 40s is now seen as a waste of both track capacity and fuel to haul 'spare' well around - the post-millenial response is that the suddenly obsolete 48' wells are gradually being either converted variously down to 40s or up to 53s. How mixed up the domestic and deep-sea traffics get depends where you are and probably what the train you're looking at is doing - the demand on the end-points on the route, whether it calls to reload/block swap en-route, and others. For example you see solid sets of deep sea traffic with no domestic leaving ports like LA/Long Beach, some of them may go all the way to Chicago as a solid block of deep-sea boxes (sometimes all from one shipping line!) - some may call at an intermodal terminal in the LA area and have empty spaces 'topped off' with 53s, some may work part way east and then 'block swap' - leave a chunk of their traffic from Long Beach for another train and pick up a block of domestic loads from somewhere else for their destination... There's so many different ways this can work it's not easy to generalise, if you're modelling something/somewhere specific look at pics of it...for example looking at CSX intermodal at Fostoria when the cam was operating shows the trains as very rarely specialised, they are a mix of cars and traffics. Looking at vids of the BNSF transcon then big solid blocks of either domestic or deep-sea is common, although mixtures do also occur... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
shortliner Posted November 5, 2012 Share Posted November 5, 2012 The reason the big ones are on top has to do with the fixing points on the containers. and the internal bracing for example a 48' has no central support-points to enable 2 x 20' to be loaded, supported and fastened on top Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adrian Wintle Posted November 5, 2012 Share Posted November 5, 2012 The reason the big ones are on top has to do with the fixing points on the containers. and the internal bracing for example a 48' has no central support-points to enable 2 x 20' to be loaded, supported and fastened on top Also the upper container can overhang the ends of the well. All the containers* are connected (hopefully securely) at the 40' points, so as long as the lower container is securely in the well and the IBCs connecting the two containers are set, it doesn't matter how far the upper container overhangs as long as it doesn't hit the one in the next car. *40' and over - as shortliner points out, 20s are a world unto themselves. Adrian Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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