Wagon weights?

Greg.P. spake thus:

Nope. We spell that word "wagons". No such thing as "waggons" here.

Hi all,

has anyone got any useful thoughts on wagon weighting? I'm building some 1/24th scale NZR wagons and imagine the results to be a bit light. I tried 1/24x24x24 of tare weight but the results are perhaps twice what seems reasonable and I'd have to include a brick in each one to achieve (scale) loaded weight. As the wagons vary from small 2 axle types through to heavyweight bogie stock the weight would need to be in proportion to length.

Any thoughts?

Regards, Greg.P.

You've confused yourself with 'waggons'. You don't see very much - the only question remaining is whether that is through your ignorance or your stupidity.

Regards, Greg.P.

Sorry about that David, I sent the response I intended for you through Mark's posting. Not to worry, it applies equally well to him also.

Regards, Greg.P.

You flush equally well whether you do or don't.

At the time when yank english split from English, the correct spelling was "waggon" - obviously your founding fathers couldn't spell either.

Once you get past the British "wagon" and understand it to be the otherwise used "freight car", the subject can be rather complex. For simplification, there are standards to which to build equipment for the model railroad, NEMA being the usual one for the European area. Following their guidlines or the American NMRA guidlines (which only define a car by it's length and existance) will provide a good interchange between the various model railroads that you may interchange with. For a private railroad, you can change that weight per car as much as you desire. The big thing is that all of your cars on the layout should weigh about as much per length to maximize the ability to put any car at any place in a train without having derailment problems. The weight issue is also about how much a loco can pull as heavier trains will pull less cars despite the cars not desiring to remove themselves from the rails as much as a much lighter system would. Thus, if you're running a small tidewater railroad with only a few cars behind the loco, you can have a highly disparate range of weights of the cqrs without problems while a climb through the Alps or the Rockies railroad running large trains would require that you rein in the disparity of the differences in weights and get the max pulling power out of the locos by lighter weight cars Also important in getting maximum length trains without pullovers is to insure large radius curves where the pullover will be worst and to slightly superelevate the track in the negative direction (the cars lean to the outside of the curve rather than the inside). I'll also note here that it is interesting to watch a train make it around a curve with the cars riding only on the inside wheels with the outside wheels lifted up a bit as the inside wheel rides flat on the rails! The perfect weighting system will have all of the cars lifting their outside wheels at the same time irrevelent of the length of the car.

-- Yeppie, Bush is such an idiot that He usually outwits everybody else. How dumb!

There's the rub! My prototype (New Zealand Railways circa 100 years ago) ran mostly very small 4 wheel wagons of circa 5 ton empty weight which carried 8-10 tons load, but also larger wagons up to 10-15 tons able to carry 20-40 tons each. The routes were through the Alps (Southern Alps) and similar routes and the trains were often long (20-50+) The loads carried were mostly raw materials, coal, timber, farm produce plus always a passenger coach or two to provide passenger services. In 1900 this generally doesn't equate to bulk "roundabout" trains, more general and with empties and loads intermixed. I really don't understand how they kept such trains on the tracks!

Chuckle.

Until I get a reasonable length of track laid I can't try practical tests, but I wonder if I should try to emulate the 1:3 ratio empty/loaded of the prototype? At present I have both heavyweight track powered locomotives and battery powered lightweights so I'm reluctant to weight the wagons very far.

Regards, Greg.P.