Bachmann Intermodal wagons

"Bob Hope" wrote

If you take a *very careful* look at these images you'll just about be able to make out the yellow plastic bits (supplied by Bachmann with the intermodals) which clip into both container and the deck of the intermodal itself and allow them to be secured in place.

John.

Thanks for that John, the enlarged pics show the clips fairly well. Why can't Bachmann put instructions in their products for fitting accessories? In my experience, it's the same with the locos, extra parts are supplied but with no indication of how/where to fit them (except nameplates on 66).

Wassa difference between "Intermodal" and container wagon?

(kim)

"kim" wrote

Intermodals tend to be semi-permanently coupled pairs of wagons whilst conventional container wagons tend to be single wagons, but other than that I suspect there is very little difference. I think the term 'intermodal' was introduced for EWS container workings because 'Freightliner' is a registered trading name.

John.

containers. Bachmann give you plenty of spares. regards, Steve

What then is a 'minimodal' (as in 'DRS Class 33 Minimodal')? Smaller container?

(kim)

I always thought that conventional container trains were also semi-permanently coupled together, except in five wagon blocks not pairs?

Fred X

Yes. (Google is your friend).

Cheers, Steve

"Fred X" wrote

You might be right, but I'm not absolutely sure.

Most early container flats were constructed using the underframes from redundant coaching stock from memory.

John.

Freightliner FEA is a twin wagon FGA & FFA and FSA & FTA are inners and outers and usually operate in fixed rakes of 4 or 5 a set.

Nick

So when I mean container wagon I should say "intermodal" and when I mean small container I should say 'minimodal'?

(kim)

Well Kim, I think containerised traffic and container wagons have been around for ever, even back to the days of horse-drawn road vehicles.

As I understand it, there are now various classes of transport containerisation, each with their own standards. We have, to my knowledge:

Palletised loads and plywood "vans", suited to road haulage; Standard airfreight containers; Intermodal containers, suited to road, rail, and sea haulage; "Minimodal" for road and rail haulage of smaller loads, an attempt to expand the intermodal market.

Just by way of a side observation, I was working for the management of Fyffes at the time they were phasing out the banana railway wagons and trying to replace them with containers. Under the old system, until the

1960's, a ship used to arrive at Southampton with thousands of tons of loose fruit in crates on board. These were unloaded by a gang of several hundred dockers, and then loaded into complete Fyffes trains, a crate at a time. Well, half of them were loaded, anyway. The working practice was "one for the company, one for me..." No way could Fyffes sell anything in the Southampton area or its environs - the market was flooded with hookey gear!

So, at the same time as BR introduced the Freightliner concept, Fyffes invested in a major container crane terminal of their own at Southampton, and chartered several complete wagon sets and hundreds of seagoing containers. The dockers unions appeared to be perfectly happy with this. At least until the terminal was opened. At that point they explained that the working practice would henceforth be to take the container off the ship and put it on the dockside. The dockers would take all the fruit out and pile it up on the ground. The crane would then put the empty containers onto the rail wagons, then the dockers would put all the loose fruit back into the containers on the wagons. This practice was known as "stripping and stuffing".

Management explained that, no, the concept was to put the loaded container straight from the ship to the rail wagon. The dockers were perplexed. How could they operate "one for the company, one for me.." in such an environment? So they "blacked" the terminal.

For some months, or it might even have been a couple of years, Fyffes continued bringing in ships of loose fruit, and ran the containers as fixed van bodies on the wagons. Then they got fed up, shut down the whole operation, and moved it to Rotterdam. From where the fruit now came in to the UK (and still does) in lorries on ro-ro ferries. And all the Fyffes ships, although British registered, never actually call at Britain. And so one more traffic flow was lost to the docks and the railways and moved to the roads.

Cheers, Steve

"Steve W"

Similar thing happened when the "containerised" the Port of Montreal". Unions tried to insist on "destuffing" within the port and loading the merchandise onto trucks by hand. Didn't succeed though. :-)

-- Cheers Roger T.

Home of the Great Eastern Railway

"Steve W"

Similar thing happened when the "containerised" the Port of Montreal". Unions tried to insist on "destuffing" within the port and loading the merchandise onto trucks by hand. Didn't succeed though. :-)

-- Cheers Roger T.

Home of the Great Eastern Railway

"Nick Gurney" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

designed to take ISO standard shipping containers, which come in a variety of sizes (20' to 45' currently). Though the boxes may be of different lengths, the fixing points are at given centres-10', 20', 30' and 40' (45' boxes have their 'Twistlocks' set in from the container ends). The 'Intermodal' wagon that Bachmann model (more normally called a 'Euro-twin' or 'Multi-fret', I've found) is of a type designed to carry 'Swap-bodies', which are a sort of container, not normally capable of stacking when loaded and therefore not suitable for maritime use. These are used throughout Western Europe, and come in a selection of lengths- the most popular ones are 13.6m, being the maximum length that can be carried on an articulated trailer, and 7.3m, which can be loaded on to a flat-bed lorry and two or three axle trailer. The 'conventional' container wagons carry a much greater paload relative to their length than do the 'Multi-fret' types. Regarding JT's point about wagons being built on converted carriage chassis- the only examples of this that I can think of were the 'Bullion- flats', which were passenger-rated purpose-built wagons on B4 bogies, which carried a single 20' box for the Bank of England. The average carriage underframe was too lightly constructed for loads like containers. On the other hand, many 'conventional' freight wagons have been converted to carry containers- both Lowmacs and Rectanks to carry early ISO boxes from Hull, for example. Brian