Hey lets steal a couple ideas from Model railroading,magnectic uncoupling,Plastic Boxcars

[M636C]

British Railways built a plastic passenger car in the (late) 1950s. It was to the British side door design, with a door to each seating bay. They had a moulded section for the body panel between the doors, and others for the sections at the end, the ends and the roof, and of course, all those doors. It was really fibreglass and they used a resin that gave the finished colour, (dark green, it belonged to the Southern Region).They used a standard steel underframe and trucks. They never built any more, but unlike the steel cars it didn't rust, and still exists in a museum.

Peter

[FThunder11]

QUOTE: Don't expect UP to buy anything from Lionel.

Thats a good one LOL

[TH&B]

Great ideas, how about worm geared traction motors, the engines won't be able to coast and it would brobably cause alot of flat spots on the wheels.

[Anonymous]

If a conducter could press a button and uncouple any car in the train that would save the conducter alot of walking. But who presses that button would be a union issue as to conducter or engineer.[?]

[Puckdropper]

oltmannd,

Model railroaders run in to the same problems. What we do is we have "conversion" cars to go from one type of coupler to the other. Since we always have an 0-5-0 handy, it works really well.

Real railroads may want to do just the same thing. ;-) They've already got sectional track.

[oltmannd]

A coupler with remote or automatic "pin pulling" and integral air connection has been long sought after, so far with no economic results. Part of the problem is that, unless you can figure a way to change the whole fleet in a couple of days (including the bucks to do it), you have compatibility issues. It's the same thing holding up ECP braking.

[Junctionfan]

Don't expect UP to buy anything from Lionel.

[ajmiller]

Yeah, with digital command control with simulated momentum and braking. And electrified flex track and cork roadbed!

[ericsp]

Trinity Industries makes fiberglass reefers.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r=2&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1='Trinity+Industries'.ASNM.&s2=fiberglass&OS=AN/%22Trinity+Industries%22+AND+fiberglass&RS=AN/%22Trinity+Industries%22+AND+fiberglass

[dharmon]

Plus whenever there was a derailment, someone could just pick up the train and put it back on the track.

[Anonymous]

magnectic uncouping at Hump Yards would save the job from h-ll of that of a pin puller and help speed switching.
Plastic boxcars would save fuel and weight...
Say we already have remote control