Who Has the Longest G-Scale Coal Train Out There?

Jeff C, here a video UP turbine long hopper cars. hehe

The Last video is IC GP30 is climbing the grade almost 1% to 2% grade. the last min is the last hopper car was derail. hehehe! i like that!

I would say that one could define "practical" as either the maximum number of cars a specific locomotive has power to pull, or the maximum amount of cars that looks right on a particular layout given it's size and configuration. For me, and my layout, that number is about 15 cars plus that locomotive. My locos can certainly pull more, but they just don't look right on my layout and they make it look small. I'd recommend starting a new thread on this topic as I too would be interested.

And now back to the subject of THIS post.....how many coal hoppers do you pull?

whats the red thingy on the end for?????

Dave, Derrill told me he oil it all his Truck each hopper car! not ball bearing! he told me about it.

Posted By NTCGRR on 08/17/2008 7:19 PM
whats the red thingy on the end for?????




It's the rolling beer cooler.

I think that if you took the red weight off the end you could probalby pull 25 more cars

Thanks, Bryan! Very nice. I may follow in your footsteps someday, and build a turbine. Big Boys, Challengers, and Turbines might be tough on a portable 11x14' home layout...

Jeff C

I started several years ago before Bachman had Metal wheels on the cars as standard. I grabbed a bunch of clearance price cars from TW. I've been grabbing what I could since then. At this point I have Bachman, Aristo and USAT hoppers & I plan to run them all together. Speaking of altogether this Sunday I had to run down to the store for milk for the girls cereal and the coal drag went thru town. 3 big NS units (not sure what they were?) and a variety of coal hoppers. Some NS, Some Conrail Q cars and a few Somerset Railroad cars. All different styles and eras and paint schemes. Wish I had my camera!

Chas

This is very timely. Our club, the Vermont Garden Railway club is having "The Great Hopper Haul-off" at the finale to our open house season. Members will be bringing all their hoppers and we have over 80 so far. At the head-end will be 2 aristo dash-9's and all the cars will have metal wheels. We hope to have over 100 the day of the event.

My question is? Does anyone have any tips, suggestions, or gotcha's that we should be aware of? Will it do any harm to the locomotives or will they just spin once they reach their limit? The railroad has 200' of track with a 2% down grade and 2% upgrade. All curves are 10' diameter. Thanks Dave Cozzens

This should be a great day of running. Only thing I can think of (assuming you are running track power) is to add all the weights in the fuel tank so they have as much tractive effort as possible. I wouldn't worry at all about any harm to the engines, the wheels will spin before anything happens just like you said.

Other than that going with all body mounted couplers (I use kadees) would be best for long trains like that to reduce derailments.

Post pics and video if you can.

Raymond