Question re: 1:1 trains....

amtrak.com

Their schedules are mearly suggestions nothing remotely accurate. On long distance trains figure one hour late per 100 miles of route at least.

misc.transport.rail.americas

(Beware of George Conklin, the resident 'troll'.)

tp://

Binaries for Linux and MS-Windows

Thanks I am on the hunt for that turd he is spamming this group too.

-- Just as McDonald's is where you go when you're hungry but don't really care about the quality of your food, Wikipedia is where you go when you're curious but don't really care about the quality of your knowledge.

- Matthew White's WikiWatch

He is not a troll on news:misc.transport.rail.americas -- but he has opinions contrary to what pro-Amtrak crowd wants to read.

To call him a troll is just plain wrong.

Sounds like a pretty accurate description to me.

No it's not.

Whether someone is really a troll or not depends on intent, and nobody but George really knows that. It's certainly possible that he actually believes all the confused drivel he posts, and merely _seems_ like a troll -- but he does act in a way that is consistent with common trolling practices.

-miles

He basically destroyed the urban planning UseNet newsgroups, singlehandedly driving all of their otherwise very lively legitimate discussions (and there are many good ones from all sorts of viewpoints) into several moderated web forvms.

He calls himself a college professor (some small two-bit school in the Durham, NC area - NOT Duke), but never seems to be able to cite his sources nor expand on and defend his arguments when challenged.

I recently purchased one of the Concor collector sets. Won't be running it, but I'm thinking about a diorama-type display. Want to combine the cars in the set with some matching others that I got from another source.

Question: Approximately how many heavyweight passenger cars would a

4-6-2 normally be able to pull?

Thanks,

Andy

Andy skriver:

It depends....

I'm mostly doing german trains, here the 4-6-2's is called 2'C1's and is the typical passenger loco for long distance trains. The BR 01, 03 and

18.4 is typical passenger locos. It was normal haul op to 10 or more passenger cars. The train called D29 in 1934 ran between Munc and Berlin and consited of 8 passenger cars, a postal car and a resturant car.

But the longer(heavier) the train gets the slower it runs. For the "high sped trains" it was typically 6-8 cars - som even shorter.

Klaus

Baltimore & Ohio's Cincinnatian had only five cars.

Bill Bill's Railroad Empire N Scale Model Railroad: History of N Scale: Railroad Bookstore: to 1,100 sites:

Thanks to all of you for this information. From the information you've provided, it appears that I shouldn't add more than two or three cars to the seven that came with the set - assuming that the diorama doesn't show any grade.

Again, thanks to all.

Andy

There's another wrinkle: the number of cars in a train would vary as passenger demand varied. During the Christmas rush, for example, the trains would be the maximum length the loco could handle, even if that slowed down the train. Or a second loco was added, or a second 'section' of the same train was added - that is, another loco or train. Sometimes, that second section would be nothing but mail cars - the Christmas rush meant a lot more business for the post office. But at other times of the year (or week), the train would be shortened - unneeded cars meant extra weight which meant extra fuels costs.

IOW, what you bought was a "typical" passenger train. There is no need to add cars in order to be prototypical. Besides, you don't say what road it represents, so none of the specialists here can tell you how close the set is to some past reality.

OTOH, if you want to be _really_ true to life, so that not nit pickers can diss you, pick a year and find out what trains that loco was assigned to. Pick a train, and model it exactly: the correct cars in the correct sequence. If you choose to go this route, you would certainly have to replace some of the cars in the set, and modify others. But then you can deflect any nit-picking criticism of your train. (Including yourself?) ;-)

Mostly, just have fun. A 10ft shadow box displaying your train against background scene will look awesome.

HTH

You're correct, Wolf. I bought a "typical" passenger train - loco and seven heavyweights. I probably should have included a bit more information in my initial query - like this is N scale, and I'm not a rivet counter.

So, with all of the above information in mind, here's what I've come up with....

I'll be doing a shadow box-type of diorama with one mainline track and one parallel siding. I'll be putting the long passenger train on the main, with a shorter freight on the siding.

While I haven't yet completed the measurements, it appears that it'll be about six feet long (maybe a bit longer, depending on the wall space and how that length will fit into that space visually).

There'll be a tunnel entrance at one end and, while it's probably not prototypical vis a vis the siding, I'll probably have a couple of small bridges somewhere along it.

As I said, I'm not a rivet-counter; nor are any of my friends. I'm merely trying to create an interesting picture, as opposed to a modeling contest winner.

But once again, thank you all.

Andy