O 4-Car Flat Car W/(1) M60 Tank Desert Scheme

For transporting large or heavy items over land, nothing beats
a railroad flat car. No wonder that manufacturers use flat cars to ship
products or sub-assemblies ranging from transformers to airliner
fuselages to heavy construction and mining equipment.

But how big is too big? That is determined by a railroad’s loading
gauge, which defines the maximum height and width of rolling
stock and engines. Great Britain, the birthplace of railroading, has
one of the smallest loading gauges because so much of its network has
bridges and tunnels built in the mid-1800s, when trains were smaller.
In the US, older, more urban eastern roads tend to have smaller loading
gauges than western roads that traverse wide-open spaces.
That’s why, for example, 1950s-era dome cars were common on
western railroads but rare in the east.

Today the Association of American Railroads (AAR) defines loading
gauges in terms of Plate designations from B to K, with the Plate C
height of 15’6” being the most common. The tallest
North American loading gauges are the Plate H requirement for
double-stack container cars and the Plate K requirement for Autoracks,
both 20’2”.
Over the years, flatcar designers have devised various means of
squeezing the most inside a loading gauge, with one of the most popular
being the depressed center flat car. Dropping the car floor down, until
it almost touches the rails between the car’s trucks, allows
room for larger loads like the huge power transformer depicted by our
model. An even more dramatic solution is the Schnabel car modeled in
our Premier line, in which the load becomes part of the structure of
the car, and can even be shifted side-to-side to clear lineside signals
and structures. But where the Schnabel car requires its own dedicated
slow-speed train, depressed center flat cars can travel as part of a
normal freight consist.

High quality, traditionally sized RailKing Freight Cars provide
detailed bodies and colorful paint schemes for the O Gauge railroader.
MTH makes an enormous variety of RailKing Freight Cars, including many
different car types and roadnames. No matter what era or part of the
country you are modeling, RailKing is sure to have something for you.