Nostalgia & History > SP 9298 West at Tunnel #17

Feb,, . 2, 1994.

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Great video.  Thank you for sharing.

I noticed something that I have never seen before at 0:53, and 1:11 into the video.  The trailers at those points are straddling two different flatcars; with their landing gear on one car, and their wheels on the next.  What was the purpose of this practice?

Simply jamming more lineal trailer footage onto lineal flat car footage. The longer trailers didn't fit so neatly as doubles on a single long flat car, so while they figured out how long trailers should be and how long flat cars should be, they came up with the idea of drawbarring 89 ft flatcars together with trailers mounted across the drawbars.

The idea also better distributes the weight over the axles, rather than one trailer sitting on one end of a long flatcar, with most of the wieght on one pair of axles and almost nothing on the second pair of axles, they were able to put more trailer over the axles. Which suggested better track performance, which they were having troubles with. The ideal approach would be shorter single trailer cars drawbarred together but this was this fix for a few years.

The rumor was that SP General offices in San Francisco made up some working demos by running down to San Antonio Hobby Shop in Mountain View and putting together some Athearn 85ft model flat cars. No idea if they ran the models someplace but at least they had something to poke at.

BoostedFridge Wrote:
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> Great video.  Thank you for sharing.
>
> I noticed something that I have never seen before at 0:53, and 1:11 into the video.  The trailers
> at those points are straddling two different flatcars; with their landing gear on one car, and
> their wheels on the next.  What was the purpose of this practice?

The "two cars" were actually a single car made up from two 85/89 foot cars permanently coupled together with a solid draw-bar so they could not accidentally be uncoupled.