Athearn Bi-Level Auto-racks now hitting the shelves...

[wcfn100]

It appears the Wabash are the only ones with end ramps? Interesting...

Yeah, if Athearn is doing this by 'era', I think they are cutting off too early.  Bridge plates seem pretty common through the 60's at least.

Jason

[wcfn100]

It would be interesting to see photos of 1960's/70s unloading facilities...

I was thinking the other day that Morning Sun must be doing a book on auto rack cars as they aren't part of the 'X' car series and they did two books on piggybacks but didn't include any autoracks.  I looked through my stuff and have some pictures showing unloading, but they are early 60's with bridge plates.


Jason

[Missaberoad]

I doubt that as decks had many designs including rounded and peaked.  I would think maybe separate bridge plates, but they'd have to be very universal.  Some flat needed up to 10" longer plates because cushioning.

This is an area I need to learn more about.

Jason

Modern racks have separate bridge plates that are placed into a groove on either side.
You bring up a point with all the different styles in use at the time it must have been a nightmare.

[nkalanaga]

JaggedBen:  Nope, your links didn't work either, although copying and pasting them did.  So it isn't the link itself, but the idea of clicking on it, as opposed to entering it into the browser address bar, that keeps it from working.  Still very strange.  Usually, if clicking a link doesn't work, and the link itself is correct, copying and pasting it won't work either.

[wcfn100]

So time for some good news, bad news.

Good news: The rack came off pretty easily and I only managed to break one pin. Most of the mounting pins weren't even glued in.

Bad news: Unless I'm blind, the rack itself is one piece (not including the wires).  This means no tri-level conversion without a ton of work and extra parts.  You'd need at least two other full racks to do it, and that won't be kind on the wallet even if you can get parts.  In the big picture the play might be to try and cast the deck and use two decks per car after cutting off the old one.  I'm sure @skytop35  would be interested in some tri-levels on the Kingsbury Branch.   

Jason

[BobRunty]

One mystery to me is how did they unload these cars without ramps? 


Jason

Apparently this method was tried in 1967 with a GTO.

Bob

[unittrain]

These are really nice cars you would think they would tool I tri-level rack too to get the most out of the flat car tooling.

[jagged ben]

JaggedBen:  Nope, your links didn't work either, although copying and pasting them did.  So it isn't the link itself, but the idea of clicking on it, as opposed to entering it into the browser address bar, that keeps it from working.  Still very strange.  Usually, if clicking a link doesn't work, and the link itself is correct, copying and pasting it won't work either.

Actually the forum is truncating my links, too.  What's weird is the first one works for me but not the second one.  So anyway, click the link and then go to your address bar and type the http:// in front of it and that works.

[nkalanaga]

When I do that, the link that appears in my address bar has the http://, so there's nothing wrong with the forum.  But it still says "Forbidden".  If I then copy that link, that didn't work, from the address bar, and paste it back into the same address bar, it works fine.  For some reason it simply won't accept a link directly from the forum, even if the link is correct.  I've never seen that before.  If there was a problem, it was because either the link was wrong, and wouldn't work by any method, or the site didn't allow direct access to the page, and again, it would work regardless of how the link was entered.

[C855B]

Isn't there a "referrer=" operator sent to the host when somebody clicks a link, versus entering it manually (or pasting) in a browser? As I mentioned about controlling hotlinking, they may have set their web service to barf on anything where "referrer" is non-null, or they're keeping a list of referrers and set the allowed accesses really low.

[bbussey]

I picked up five of the six in order to draw the artwork for the anti-vandal panels, but I only intend to keep the NYC car from this batch and that's the only car I've inspected so far. One thing I did notice is that it had three broken details on one side of the car that happened at the factory that were poorly glued back together. So make sure to inspect your models thoroughly.

The model may be riding a little high also, but that would require some major surgery in the coupler area since Athearn doesn't design their coupler pockets to accept MTL knuckles.

[unittrain]

Looking forward to the vandal panels, got one of each scheme and going to put panels on 3 of them.

[nkalanaga]

Mike:  I don't know about the "referrer=", not having any experience in IP programming, but it does make sense, and fits the symptoms.

[jmarley76]

These are really nice cars you would think they would tool I tri-level rack too to get the most out of the flat car tooling.

They need to fix their foob with the acid tank release first...   

[James Costello]

Yeah, if Athearn is doing this by 'era', I think they are cutting off too early.  Bridge plates seem pretty common through the 60's at least.
Jason

From Jim Panza's "Thirty-five years of Trailer Train" in the July 1990 RMC "the bridge plates were removed from the rack cars in the mid-1960s and portable aluminium bridge plates were used at each loading and unloading facility instead."