Model Railroading > Thrall vs Gunderson Centerbeams

Exactrail has just announced a new release of the 1977 built Thrall centerbeams including BN, BNSF, NOKL (ex-WP), UP (both original and brown repaints), and MILW (gray SOO LINE era). I puzzled about the very similar Trailer Train Cars and did a little research, and this is what I found.
It's interesting how the Thrall and Gunderson Centerbeams of the 70's and 80's look identical....but with a catch. The Gunderson cars seem to be previous Thrall designs. I'm basing all this on photos, but Gunderson's first Centerbeams for Trailer Train built in 1986 were virtually identical to the Thrall cars of 1977, save for the lifting holes in the outside of the bulkheads. Thrall had updated it's design with the 1983 built BN cars that featured the lifting holes and corner gussets in the top corners of the bulkheads. Those were also features of the Thrall 1986 68' Trailer Train cars. Gunderson adopted the corner gussets at the start of 1987.
Thrall built a trio of super long centerbeams (81' interior) with a new truss design for BN in March of 1986. Thrall then adopted the truss design for all centerbeam cars at the start of 1987, dropping the opera window design. But all the cars Gunderson built in the 1987-1994 time frame look identical to the cars Thrall built in 1986 (minus the 3 BN cars). Gunderson finally adopted it's own design in 1995 which included a full length truss. Thrall somewhat copied the Gunderson design in 1999.
Photo below is of a Gunderson car built in 1986, should be very easy to kitbash from the Exactrail car.

Ted Curphey
Ontario, OR



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/19/20 07:33 by funnelfan.

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What I like about Exactrails new release is that the cars are 63' which makes them just about doable for smaller layouts like mine from an operation standpoint.

Yeah... I caved and snagged a flashy new(ish) BNSF one. I figured several years ago that these older shorter 'beamers' were basically passing their age-out dates and were being scrapped. Well would you believe it, I saw one rolling by the yard in So Cal just a few months back loaded up with a plastic wrapped load of 2x4s. Guess they still got a little life yet!

~ Mr. MRL

Since they were built after July 1974, they should be good for 50 years of service per AAR rules.  The main thing working against older centerbeams like these are capacity vs. tare weight in comparison to newer, larger cars.  

MrMRL Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Yeah... I caved and snagged a flashy new(ish) BNSF
> one. I figured several years ago that these older
> shorter 'beamers' were basically passing their
> age-out dates and were being scrapped. Well would
> you believe it, I saw one rolling by the yard in
> So Cal just a few months back loaded up with a
> plastic wrapped load of 2x4s. Guess they still got
> a little life yet!
>
> ~ Mr. MRL

SP_8299 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Since they were built after July 1974, they should
> be good for 50 years of service per AAR rules.
>  The main thing working against older centerbeams
> like these are capacity vs. tare weight in
> comparison to newer, larger cars.  
>
> MrMRL Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Yeah... I caved and snagged a flashy new(ish)
> BNSF
> > one. I figured several years ago that these
> older
> > shorter 'beamers' were basically passing their
> > age-out dates and were being scrapped. Well
> would
> > you believe it, I saw one rolling by the yard
> in
> > So Cal just a few months back loaded up with a
> > plastic wrapped load of 2x4s. Guess they still
> got
> > a little life yet!
> >
> > ~ Mr. MRL

The 50 year limit is actually federal law (49 CFR 215.203).



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/19/20 16:26 by EricSP.

Right now the demand for lumber is crazy and all the centerbeam cars in storage are getting pulled out for service. Someone posted a video yesterday of a 1986 Thrall built TTZX 60' centerbeam being delivered to a Oregon Sawmill for loading.

Ted Curphey
Ontario, OR

I caught TTZX 86024 Opera window centerbeam, built 7-86, on Aug 28th. It was headed to Cali with unwrapped lumber. I hadn't seen one in years.

Posted from Android

A lot of the opera window cars have been hauling other things like ties, aluminium ingots and stuff like that because the mills wanted the larger truss type cars so they could ship more product on each car.