I built the small urban area around my carfloat terminal using Proto:87 girder rail and street running cobblestones. It was difficult trackage to lay, because it was essentially hand laying each individual 3-inch rail section. It looks really good, but I wouldn't recommend it for running freight cars to a carfloat. The rail is just too small, and standard rolling stock wheels easily slip out. The appearance is not worth the number of derailments. For me, a solid, reliably running railroad is better than striving for so much prototype accuracy that reliability is sacrificed.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
At our club layout (70x72 with hand-laid track and turnouts), we've banned semi-scale wheels as they do give us quite a bit of trouble. Usually when a car derails it's a car problem rather than a track problem. One member had a lot of semi-scale stuff and most of the derailments were his equipment. Bummer, because they do look nice.
Aaron
MisterBeasley I built the small urban area around my carfloat terminal using Proto:87 girder rail and street running cobblestones. It was difficult trackage to lay, because it was essentially hand laying each individual 3-inch rail section. It looks really good, but I wouldn't recommend it for running freight cars to a carfloat. The rail is just too small, and standard rolling stock wheels easily slip out. The appearance is not worth the number of derailments. For me, a solid, reliably running railroad is better than striving for so much prototype accuracy that reliability is sacrificed.
When a train is running or even when cars are being switched, who can actually see that the wheels are too wide. We are usually looking at our cars from the side. If some are bothered by the wide wheels, they have the option to replace them.
I want my wheels and couplers to operate reliably and it doesn't bother me one bit that they are both oversized. The NMRA standards aren't broke. Don't fix them.