Hi everyone! I need your help. My searches have come up empty.
I just purchased a flat car through eBay. It is an Athearn 200 ton 4 truck Westinghouse unit. It is not a depressed center car. My question is: does anyone have any pictures of this type of car with a load on it, or any suggestions of what it would have carried?
I have already come to some conclusions. Given that it is Westinghouse the loads would be electrical obviously. Most pictures of large electrical loads I have seen are of transformers, and they are almost always on depressed center cars. So, what specific product would Westinghouse have used a heavy capacity non-depressed center flat car for?
Further, if you think the load would be transformers that don't require the depressed center cars for height, do you know of any HO transformer models that would fill the bill?
Thanks as always!
Dave
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
i don't know if westinghouse had any cars like yours and i can't find any photos of them if they do. athearn also sold that same kit lettered for the Pennsylvania railroad so there is a good chance that it is a generic car and not a real model of a particular prototype. that was a common practice years ago when these kits came out and continues to some extent to this very day.
westinghouse was not just a transformer shipper. they were heavy into steam turbines and all matter of nuclear reactors and other power generating gadgets. therefor, not all their shipments would be so tall as to need a depressed center car, just a high weight capacity one.
i did find a picture on rrpicturearchives.net of a much larger car than the athearn model and it was not a depressed center type. it is the only wecx photo on that site. it is not hauling a transformer but something else large and heavy.
charlie
Just because the car's capacity is 200 tons, the load doesn't have to be 200 tons.
24 7-ton transformers would total 168 tons without tiedowns and bracing. They would just about fill out the requirements for wiring a Levittown-size suburban development.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
WECX #103
When Centrl Power and Light Company built their Barney Davis Power Station on the south edge of Corpus Christi (and the north edge of the King Ranch) about 1976, they gave the news department where I worked a heads up, and I got the assignment to shoot this car. It's load, as a recall, was a stator, the non rotating part of a dynamo. I guess they shipped the rotor separately. (Some assembly required. SOME assembly.)
The car was delivered to a spur on the Naval Air Station branch of the Texas-Mexican Railroad, and trucked the last five miles to the plant.
Do you like BIG loads?
And to think I once got paid to take pictures like this, once in a while. And ten cents an hour over minimum wage. PAID!
I didn't get paid for this-- it's a model.
But you knew that.
leighant WECX #103 It's load, as a recall, was a stator, the non rotating part of a dynamo. I guess they shipped the rotor separately. (Some assembly required. SOME assembly.)
It's load, as a recall, was a stator, the non rotating part of a dynamo. I guess they shipped the rotor separately. (Some assembly required. SOME assembly.)
I believe that a dynamo is a direct current generating machine. What you have here is a stator, the stationary part of a generator, an alternating current generating machine. In the larger generator sizes as shown in your photo, the rotor is shipped separately.
Yes, some assembly is required. Those two locations that appear to be large black holes are where the generator lifting trunnions are installed. Those two horizontal flanges are where the stator sits on the foundation sole plates. There are shims on the sole plates to adjust for elevation. At the ends of the stator where you see that round bolting flange is where the generator end shields are attached. The end shields contain the bearings, oil deflectors, and (if hydrogen cooled) the hydrogen seal assemblies.
The rotor was slid in from the end. At GE where I used to work, we had a skid pan that would sit inside the bottom ID of the stator. The rotor was slung in a crane and partially inserted into the stator. The load was then lowered until the inner end of the rotor landed on a rotor shoe. The rotor lifting cables were then rearranged to lift the rotor at the outer end. Cables were attached to the inside end and the rotor was pulled the rest of the way into the stator. We actually used canning wax as a lubricant between the skid pan and the rotor shoe.
Probably more than you wanted to know.
I don't believe Westinghouse had any flats like the Athearn 4-truck.
The Athearn 4-truck flat was my first HO freight car (and prior to that, Lionel's 4-truck depressed flat was my first post-trainset purchase). It's hard to resist, isn't it? I bought mine in 1959, so they've been around a LONG time. It's kinda close to a lot of 4-truck flats and makes an affordable stand-in for them. I don't see it as a GREAT model; but there isn't anything better at that price. Maybe Exactrail ought to make one. Their little depressed center car is quite nice. They sold pretty well; they've only got them left in two roads.
Ed
If you have access to the Conrail Color Guide to Freight Equipment, there is a picture of Conrail flat 770062 that looks pretty close to that Athearn flat.
Thanks everyone for the information and pictures. You have been a great help. The stator load looks fairly simple to model so I am inclined to go in that direction.
I am not a rivet counter by any means, so I can live with the fact that Westinghouse may not actually have owned the unit that Athearn modeled.
The Athearn double truck car is similar to some cars the Chicago & North Western had. Go to page 17 on this link for photos and information from the C&NW Historical Society's modeling division
It shows the idea of hiding the load with a tarp which is entirely prototypical.
http://www.cnwhs.org/cnwhs_modeler/Modeler_3_2.pdf
Note that the Athearn car (and the 99 cent copycat Hong Kong made "Crown" knockoff from the 1960s) are mounted far too high on their trucks, due to the realities of most model railroad curves, flanges, couplers and the like. Thus the Athearn car might not be able to manage quite as tall a load as its prototype and still stay within NMRA clearance standards.
Dave Nelson
Thanks for the additional pictures. Covering the load with a tarp is a good idea but the stator shown in a previous post looks neat and shouldn't be too hard to model. Athearn did a decent job of modeling the underframe. The only problem is that some of the holes are filled with weights to bring the car up to NMRA standards. The underside is painted silver. I will paint the weights black to hide them a bit.
You are quite right - the car sits too high. I ended up having to raise the height of the car body even more to get the couplers to proper height. The couplers are mounted on the beam that connects the two trucks, so eack truck had to be shimmed individually. Raising the body was also necessary to provide clearance for the couplers below the bed. The car showed some wear where the couplers had been sliding against the body. I am going to study the car to see if I can body mount the couplers to reduce the height of the car. The model with the tarped load in the newsletter appears to have body mounted couplers.
Thanks again
hon30critter You are quite right - the car sits too high. I ended up having to raise the height of the car body even more to get the couplers to proper height.
You are quite right - the car sits too high. I ended up having to raise the height of the car body even more to get the couplers to proper height.
Use Underset shank couplers.
Lee
It might be that if your curves are generous you can shave the bolsters etc a bit. body mounting the couplers and using offset shank couplers can create some usable room
And it might be possible also to cheat a little and use smaller wheels than the 33" wheels the Athearn car comes with.
Lee and Dave
Thanks for the underset shank suggestions. Didn't occur to me - duh!
If I body mount the couplers and use the underset shanks I may be able to reduce the deck height fairly significantly to get the low-slung look of the original. My plan as it sits today is to have min. 25" radii so hopefully the coupler assemblies won't bind. There seems to be lots of clearance for the wheels even with the deck lowered but the tops of the wheels will never sit inside the frame members like the prototype.
This is one of the fun parts of the hobby for me. Kinda like hot rodding an old car but more affordable!
now you guys have got me going too. i have 2 of these on the layout and a couple more still in their boxes. guess i will try to alter them to see if i can lower the bodies. the two that are on the layout have been running for years and i don't think either of them has ever been on the ground. i was pleasantly surprised to find how well they track regardless of where they wind up in a 35 car train. i am using 36 inch curves and number 6 switches
when you start running your h/d flat car, don't forget to run an empty idler ahead and behind it to keep the weight from becoming too concentrated on the track. also in special freight train service, several empties are a good idea for the extra braking. at least that is how we did it way back when.
I was able to lower the deck by reworking the pivot points that the main truck frames ride on. Using a razor saw I cut off the rounded part of the bolsters that the trucks pivot on. Then I cut off the spacers that the rounded pivot points were mounted on. Then I glued the original rounded pivot points directly to the bottom of the frame. This reduces the height of the deck by about 1/32". The tops of the main truck frames and the bottom of the deck structure have to be perfectly smooth because the main truck frame will now be sliding on the bottom of the deck structure under some conditions. I do not have the means to check the operation of the car on curves but the trucks seem to swivel freely despite the minor contact with the bottom of the car. However, the ability of the double truck assembly to pivot fore and aft has been pretty much eliminated so I would suggest modifying only one car to start to see if that creates tracking problems. One important additional point is that you may have to use shorter screws to mount the truck assemblies so the screws don't push up on the deck.
I then cut pockets for the body mount couplers out of the car ends and frame about 1/32" deep. That allowed me to remove the spacer washers that I had originally mounted on the individual trucks, and it allowed me to use centerset couplers instead of buying underset ones. I used the original truck mounted coupler pockets. I cut them off of the trucks right behind where the coupler pocket cover ends, and then I cut the end of the center truck off so it is the same as the non-coupler end. I had to round the end of the center truck bar slightly so it could pivot free of the coupler pocket.
Here are a couple of pictures. The top picture shows the modified pivot point with the part removed below the car. You can also see where I added lead sheet into the frame pockets to bring the car up to NMRA standards, and where the coupler pockets are recessed into the frame. The second shows the modified truck assembly: