TARIFF O GE Dep.Center Flatcar w/Transformer Load

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.

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