drawbar well cars

[rluke]

What are the advantages of a drawbar well car? On drawbar flat cars they will sometimes overlap trailers from 1section to the next, but they cannot do that with containers.
It seems that not being able to uncouple the sections would be a disadvantage.
Thanks Rich

[StillGrande]

It removes that much more slack action in the train. Less chance of damaging the goods in the containers.

[Anonymous]

Single and drawbar well cars have a load capacity of 160,000 lbs. Articulated well cars have a load capacity of around 120,000 lbs. Thus, you have a 33% increase in load factor while still reducing slack for the drawbar connected well cars.

Furthermore, most stack trains run in unit train configuration, so more often than not it is unnecessary to uncouple them except for maintenance.

[tree68]

Seems like I just read in another thread about car charges, too. Something like if they are connected with drawbars, they are considered one car. Believe this applies to the ports, like LA/LB.

[CShaveRR]

The only reason you see trailers overlapping from one flat to the next is because these cars were specifically redesigned for that. It's a way of getting some use out of an otherwise obsolete piece of freight equipment. You have pairs of 89-foot flat cars, each of which could originally carry a pair of 40-foot trailers. It didn't take too much to make them able to handle pairs of 45-footers. But nowadays you have 48-foot and 53-foot trailers, and only one would be able to fit on each 89-foot car. So the hitches and parts of the platforms were modified so two flats could handle three of these longer trailers.

The ideal way of handling the longer trailers is on a five unit articulated spine car. Eventually anough of these will be around to render the articulated 89-foot pairs unnecessary.

I believe your original questions have been answered, though: car hire, the tare weight advantages of containers over trailers, the clearance advantages of well cars over conventional flats, the load-limit advantages of drawbar-connected wells over pin-articulated wells.

[rluke]

Thank you all for the responses. My original question is answered.
Here is a couple of more related questions.

Is slack alway undesirable? Or does it help when the trains starts from a dead stop?
How hard is it to disconnect the sections of a drawbar car for maintenance?
Thanks again Rich