If anyone has 22 inch curves and has problems running Walthers autoracks, chances are, its not the car itself. Its probably a kink in the rails in a section of curve. For those with flextrack curves, I can't help you, since I work with sectional curves. I recently got a Conrail autorack (vintage Walthers) and I had an 89' CSX high-cube that ran poorly and stayed coupled even worse. I still have it, but I found why it ran bad. So this autorack, first one, in consist and in reality, that I have. I tried running it with the horn/hook couplers that came with it and it pulled a Conrail boxcar ahead of it off the rails. It irst, I thought, "Holy Mother, you've gotta be kidding me!" I'd been looking for a CR rack for a while, but those things are rare, and usually, if your lucky, really pocket emptying. Vintage, and less than $25. Anyway, I swticed out the couplers with modern Walthers Proto-MAX couplers from a well car that I got from my local train shop. Ran like a dream, and, unlike my CSX High-cube, didh't slow the train at the end of the southern curve of my small, oval layout. As I stated before, most 89' autoracks that derail at a 22" radius curve aren't defective, or the car infront pulls it off, OR thecurve is too tight, it just could be the wrong couplers or a kink in the rails. Either way, my car is vintage, and it runs way better than a modern 89er on 22" curves, so, it may work or, it may not. Depends on the car, I guess.
Crap happens. When it does, stop, take a deep breath, and call the wreck train.
Good points -- 22" radius curves are challenging enough for big equipment but all too often you see various forms of 'cheating' -- kinks in the rails to "force" the sectional track to do what you want it to and such and that includes where the track meets turnouts. Indeed some of the worst cheating is due to cutting off flex track with the Dremel but then not adjusting the ends of the rails to make them even where they meet turnouts. You can have a kink and not see a telltale gap as you can see with sectional track.
Another aspect is that most of the really long cars on our layouts are considerably underweight compared to NMRA standards. I know some guys insist the NMRA standards are wrong and unworkable for really long cars -- even so, if the goal is to have some sort of consistent weighting standards rather than follow NMRA standards per se, the long cars are still usually underweight. And autoracks have the added challenge of sometimes being top heavy. And old technique was to wrap fine solder around the axles to both add weight in general and to lower the center of gravity.
Dave Nelson
Yeah. I tried weighting a few cars on a little six car train, four gondolas, two tanks, and a bulkhead car, nothing over 50', and anything lighter than those cars (each about 10oz) was forced of the track when switching these cars, and I had to use 3 locomotives (Model Power GP9, RS-2(I did a help me on that one. Search Model Power RS-2 help), Athearn SD40-2, pre-1990's) when my Athearn 12V power cab can barely handle two newer model Bachmann B30s. Man that train went slow!!