O TTX Dep.Ctr.Flatcar w/Transformer

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.