Speaking of cheap....
I've been running my D&H intermodal train over the last few weeks down here in the office. I think I've expressed some of the difficulties involved in running 89' flat cars with trailers on a twisty-turny layout with scenery buzzing by in close quarters. It's a challenge. Sometimes running this train is not fun and over the years I have resorted to excluding some of the 18 flats in this consist, excluding trailers, or just parking the beast. The whole train is HEAVY, and turning portions of it while the front end of the train is headed downhill while the rest is heading up leads to some interesting disasters. The disasters are remarkably worse because I have not anchored each trailer to its flat car since I'd like to wait until I weather each car (some day in the near distant future).
For fun and future sanity, I've been running and experimenting to find an optimal performance for this train running at its full length. The flat cars themselves come from 2 manufacturers - Walthers and Atlas, but even though there are only two manufacturers, I've built my fleet up over a period of years and different runs of flat cars seem to get different designs. Due to the length of each car and the distance between the trucks and the couplers, there is some discernable movement of each coupler pair up and down and side to side over my layout due to variations in track grade and operations through curves. I'm guessing that people that run 90' boxcars and 90' car carriers probably have similar issues.
I normally don't try to break this train up - the cars stay together in the same order, so I've been running unloaded and trying to swap cars out to optimize coupler retention and overall operation. One obvious thing I did find is that two piece plastic Accurail Accumate couplers (found on only one (so far) of these these heavy flatcars) is a recipe for disaster. As much as I love Stewart and Bowser products, their default inclusion of Accumate couplers (even for locomotives!) is a policy I'd like to see them change. There is a Great Western flat that was always one of the first cars to exclude. After examining it tonight, one of the coupler's (Accumate) was so badly bent (downward) that the coupler would open by itself with just a little bit of flex.
A set of Kadee 148's seem to work much better. For short cars on the lighter side, these couplers are an economic way to get knuckle coupler realism, but in a lot of cases, replacement with a cast set of couplers is a much better way to run. I'm also a big fan of the "whisker" style rather than the copper insert that acts as a spring.
Sometimes the aggravation is NOT worth the cost savings, and I'm sure I'm probably preaching to the choir on this one....
