Jim Kelly -"The case for body-mounted couplers"

[craigolio1]

  Try putting a Trainworx 85' autoparts car (with body-mounted couplers from the factory) and putting it in the first twenty cars of a 40 or 50 car train.  Now try to pull that train around a 21" radius curve on a 3% grade.  That Trainworx car tips over to the inside of the track, and you've to a runaway.  Move the Trainworx car to the back half the train, and you're fine.

BC Rail, my railroad of choice, as a rule ran all of their 80+ ft TOFC cars at the rear of trains.  Helpers were cut in ahead of these cuts of long cars.  I'm not sure why but they did have really tight curves and some of the steepest grades around.

If you have to put cars in a specific location in a train to make it work then do it.  The prototype does the same.

Craig

[nkalanaga]

Craig:  It isn't just BC Rail:

"All cars 80 feet or longer, loaded or empty, should be placed on rear of train for movement over any grade of 1% or more and where track curvature is 6° or greater."
(list of subdivisions affected - deleted)
"In helper territory, helper engines must be cut in ahead of above equipment."

From Burlington Northern Inc. 
Pacific Division 
Special Instructions
No. 1
In effect at 12:01 A.M.
Pacific Standard Time
Friday, May 10, 1968.

Yes, I know, the merger wasn't until 1970.  They issued these in anticipation of the merger, which was then delayed by legal issues.  My father worked for the NP, and they were issued to everyone on the division.

I agree.  If the trains run better with certain cars in certain positions, run them that way.  The real railroads go with what DOES work, not what SHOULD work.  Of course, if you can make them work equally well in other locations, so much the better.

[jagged ben]

BC Rail, my railroad of choice, as a rule ran all of their 80+ ft TOFC cars at the rear of trains.  Helpers were cut in ahead of these cuts of long cars.  I'm not sure why but they did have really tight curves and some of the steepest grades around.

If you have to put cars in a specific location in a train to make it work then do it.  The prototype does the same.

Craig

Yes, well, it sucks when your prototype did things that are very hard to achieve in N scale.   For example Santa Fe (unlike your BC rail) used to stick pushers on the back of trains of 89' TOFC cars over Tehachapi.    In fact they ran the 89' cars in any part of the train.   So if I want to model that on our club layout, do I put truck-mounted cars at the front of the train, and my body mounted cars at the back?  And make a non-prototypical distinction between the two?

Don't get me wrong, I take your point, it's just that I prefer it if the choices have some resemblance to the choices the prototype would need to make.  Sticking with either type of coupler mounting will sometimes make that difficult in different ways.

[GaryHinshaw]

On my Tehachapi, I'm hopeful that DPUs will let me run 89' cars anywhere in the train, like the prototype.  Without DPUs, 89' cars in the front of a long train need to have truck-mounts going uphill and body-mounts going down...