Lot of Blades

Check out this thread ....

Modeling a wind turbine blade flatcar load | O Gauge Railroading On Line Forum (ogaugerr.com)

@Richie C.,

Thanks.  The picture actually doesn't do justice to the massive size of those things.   They look a whole lot bigger in real life!

Thanks @gunrunnerjohn.  That's about the number of blades I saw on the train, but as I said there was an empty flatbed (or maybe 2) between each blade.  The video made clear how the blades were organized, tip end next to tip end, and attachment end next to attachment end.  I didn't notice that yesterday.

Whoa....72 flat cars! I have never seen that many flat cars in one train! May be during WWII...but I wasn't around then. 😁

Interesting that these actually overlapped on the cars for both trains, no space at all between them.  I wonder why they left that much space between them on the train you saw?

The additional video showing at the end of second one GRJ posted is something. Going around a 90% curve. Obviously route planning for clearance is important on these transfers. Says those blades are 243' long!

Really glad to see that these are going some distance by train, and aren't next to us on the Interstate!!

When our daughter was attending vet school at Iowa State, we would drive from NC to visit her.  Most of those trips we saw massive tractor-trailer rigs transporting those blades on the Interstate.  There had to be some serious route planning to meet clearances.

For 6 years or so, I often traveled between Little Rock and Houston twice a year or more.  Almost always there was a caravan of these things, generally headed West.

Not a good consist for O27 layout! Oh well

@Mark V. Spadaro posted:

Not a good consist for O27 layout! Oh well

I suspect it's not a good consist for any reasonable O-scale layout if you're using scale length blades!   Each blade would be five feet long at 1:48 scale!

@Mark V. Spadaro,

I don't know if you saw a post I quickly took down, since it appeared to have some info from my iPad.

What I posted was a link to this article in 'Texas Monthly' about where old wind turbine blades go to die.  It appears you can access this story and another story many times, but if try to access a third story you have to buy a subscription.  I found the article to be very interesting.  The moral of the story is green energy isn't always so green.