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[quote user="nbrodar"] After spine cars came into wide spread use, there was no need to convert the Front Runners.   The problem wasn't the drawbar connections.  It was the long rigid wheelbase of the single car.   Personal experiance is all I need to know about these cars.  More then once, they have derailed on me.  And like I said before, one had a catastophic failure of both wheelsets, because of in-train forces. It's becoming clear, that the Iron Highway cars were maintaince nightmares, possibly due to design, improper training, or the cost for specialty parts.  The answer is probably a combination of the three.    It seem CP had no spare parts.  Why?  Cost? Avalablility? Parts were requested and never delivered.   Did no -one order them?  Did the company not support it's product? You can't replace what you don't have. As for the absurd comment about replacing coal gon journals.  Every car shop has parts in stock for that coal gon, so it's a quick, easy fix.   The Iron Highway parts were very speciallized and not widely avalable, or evidently avalable at all. [/quote] What it comes down to is a sort of Catch-22 for new concepts in railroading.  Railroads have become obsessed with standardization, yet most new ideas inherently incorporate parts and mechanisms that haven't had time to become standardized.  In the end, the vendor of new ideas better be able to stock all the rail shops with the necessary spare parts if he wants his idea to have the time to supply feedback, make the necessary modifications, and eventually gain acceptance. As I pointed out to Tom, if the railroads (via TTX) could go the length of retrofitting 89' flats into Long Runners and 48' spine cars into 53' spine cars, they would have done well to do the same for the Four Runners rather than scrapping the whole lot.  What I mentioned about the drawbar connections of the Four Runners goes right to the heart of the rigidity debate.  Articulating those AC and DB connections would reduce the overall rigidity of each platform, and should have mitigated any such derailment tendencies.  For what it's worth, I have accomplished such an improvement in scale model with a little kit bashing, so such an improvement in tracking should translate to full scale. Why bother?  Because even with the articulation modification, the neo Four Runners would still have a net tare advantage over the standard 53' spine cars, albeit reduced by half from 5000' per platform to about 2000' per platform.
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