Lou, it looks like you have some nice variety there. I have some Walthers trailers and they're 32', did they do 35's as well? A suggestion for your walthers 75' cars: you can reposition the hitches a bit so it can carry a 40' trailer at the "front" and a 32' at the rear, will give you a bit more flexibility. There's something appealing about the small ramp in the early days of piggyback, particulrly of course, for modelers. They can be placed almost anywhere you have a spur and space to park a few trailers. In his Diamond article, Bill Gale pointed out another reason eastern roads like EL preferred to handle containers on chassis: cramped quarters. Many if not most piggyback facilities of the time were located on the periphery of classification yards and so had limited space, particularly for trailer parking. Normally when a trailer was taken from parking and loaded on a flat, it created space for another trailer arriving at the terminal. However if a container was loaded on deck, or "on its belly", the chassis had to be parked once again, taking up space for days perhaps, waiting for another COFC assigned to its pool. This was just one aspect of the chassis management problem that gave RR's a disincentive to handle COFC until the business reached a critical mass. Modern terminals mitigate the chassis storage issue by stacking them vertically in "chassis racks", using a specially equipped tractor to raise the front. Paul B I wondered if the containers were shipped with or without the chassis. Todd K. Stearns The Erie Lackawanna Mailing List Sponsored by the ELH&TS http://www.elhts.org To Unsubscribe: http://lists.elhts.org/erielackunsub.html ------------------------------
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