Here it is in person! What a great job Menards did again.. From the rotating bearing caps to the fine detail, again, a home run. As the pictures show, the 2 screws holding each car can be unscrewed, the bottom ones , no problem, but the top ones could be a little tricky,
only if you wanted to remove the cars. I can see another order for these coming soon .. Bob
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Entrapment !
Great Photos ! Thank you ! now to watch the video again..
Thank you for the photos, Bob! So I see from the underside the desks are wood/fiber board. What about the upright supports holding the top deck and safety cable?
Thanks for the pictures.
You can have any color you'd like, so long as it's red or yellow.
Mark Boyce posted:Thank you for the photos, Bob! So I see from the underside the desks are wood/fiber board. What about the upright supports holding the top deck and safety cable?
It looks like a combination of wood and plastic to me.
Thanks for the pics. The only thing I see missing is the brake wheel but still a great looking auto carrier.
wild mary posted:Thanks for the pics. The only thing I see missing is the brake wheel but still a great looking auto carrier.
Come on Nick, I am sure you have one laying around that broke off one of your other cars you can put on it! LOL
cabinet Bob posted:Mark Boyce posted:Thank you for the photos, Bob! So I see from the underside the desks are wood/fiber board. What about the upright supports holding the top deck and safety cable?
It looks like a combination of wood and plastic to me.
Yes I see what you mean, Bob!
Thank you!!
I think they are a great looking car! If I had the extra cash I would buy the Dealers pack! For those of you who like the car but not the new era of the autos, just take them off and resale them. I know there is people out there willing to buy them! People like me! LOL
It's a win win idea! you get some of the money back and people like me get some cool cars! I can always repaint them if I want too!
Saw this on a Corvair list. The RR switched to tri-level racks.
"The railroad mis-routed one of the trains, and a bridge sheared the roofs off of about 120 Corvairs on the
top deck of tri-level cars before the train ground to a halt, jammed under the bridge. The
railroad returned those rail cars to the plant, and we stripped all the mechanicals (engines,
transmissions, front & rear suspensions) off the cars and scrapped everything else."
Check those clearences!
mike g. posted:wild mary posted:Thanks for the pics. The only thing I see missing is the brake wheel but still a great looking auto carrier.
Come on Nick, I am sure you have one laying around that broke off one of your other cars you can put on it! LOL
Mike I had to order six of them to put on my Menards military flats.
wild mary posted:mike g. posted:wild mary posted:Thanks for the pics. The only thing I see missing is the brake wheel but still a great looking auto carrier.
Come on Nick, I am sure you have one laying around that broke off one of your other cars you can put on it! LOL
Mike I had to order six of them to put on my Menards military flats.
See that shows your just an old salt at this! Kids Play, you would have it done in Seconds!
I can see that by removing the bottom level cars a angled screwdriver could access the upper rack....that or a Phillips bit in a 1/4" drive ratchet. Budget issues will cause me to wait and see if empty racks are offered. Thanks for the photos.
Until the early 1960s, automobiles that were moved by rail were carried in boxcars. These were 50 feet long with double-wide doors. Inside were room for four full-sized sedans on a two-tier rack - two raised up off the floor on a steel rack and two others tucked in underneath them. This protected the cars during transport but wasn’t very efficient has the weight of four vehicles was far less than the maximum weight a boxcar that size could carry.
When 85-foot and 89-foot flatcars came into service, it was possible to pack a total of fifteen automobiles in one car on tri-level auto racks. But it still didn’t exceed the maximum allowable weight for each flatcar.
When Chevrolet started designing ‘Vega’ during the 1970s, one of the main objectives was to keep the cost of the car down around $2,000 in circa-1970 dollars. At the time, the freight charge for moving a loaded railroad car from the Lordstown assembly plant to the Pacific coast - the longest distance that cars produced at Lordstown would need to travel - was around $4,800. Since the Vega was a subcompact, it was possible to squeeze three more cars on a railroad car for a total of eighteen, instead of the usual fifteen. But that still worked out to around $300 per car – a substantial surcharge for a $2000 car. If only Chevrolet could get more Vegas on a railroad car, the cost per unit of hauling them would go down.
The engineers at GM and the Southern Pacific Railroad came up with a clever solution. Instead of loading the cars horizontally, the Vegas will be placed vertically on a specially designed auto-rack – the Vert-A-Pac. Within the same volume of an 89-foot car, the Vert-A-Pac could hold as many as 30 automobiles instead of 18.
Chevrolet's goal was to deliver Vegas topped with fluids and ready to drive to the dealership. In order to be able to travel nose-down without leaking fluids all over the railroad, Vega engineers had to design a special engine oil baffle to prevent oil from entering the No. 1 cylinder, batteries had filler caps located high up on the rear edge of the case to prevent acid spilling, the carburetor float bowl had a special tube that drained gasoline into the vapor canister during shipment, and the windshield washer bottle stood at a 45 degree angle. Plastic spacers were wedged in beside the powertrain to prevent damage to engine and transmission mounts. The wedges were removed when cars were unloaded.
The Vega was hugely popular when it was introduced in 1970 however it quickly earned a reputation for unreliability, rust, safety issues and lousy engine durability. When the Vega was discontinued, the Vert-A-Pac cars had to be retired as they were too specialized to be used with anything else. The Vert-A-Pac racks were scrapped, and the underlying flatcars went on to other uses.
wow who would have thought!
Vert-a-pac and the car it carried.....failure at a high level. All the special things they had to do to the Vega to transport it on it's nose just set it up to fail.
Like most GM products, they should have been scraped as they left the plant. Such poor quality in every regard. I can't imagine why they've lasted as long as they have.
I've seen a photo of the very-a-pac cars, but didn't know the story. Yes the Vega was a low end car. I can imagine there was a lot of factory and dealer prep involved before the car could be sold.
Mark Boyce posted:I've seen a photo of the very-a-pac cars, but didn't know the story. Yes the Vega was a low end car. I can imagine there was a lot of factory and dealer prep involved before the car could be sold.
Not as much as you might think. GM had to engineer all fluid openings and vents above the fluid levels when the car stood on it's nose. This lead to some odd engineering. When we got married my wife had a 75 Vega.......I hated working on it. Fuel pump failed at 40K and I had to remove the glove box to access it!!!
breezinup posted:
If some manufacturer would make these as an actual scale 86' in O gauge, I would get myself into real trouble. You cannot model SLSF without a healthy cut of open autoracks. Eh wot?
It should be KTTX or BTTX not DTTX on the flat car with auto rack.
DTTX is for intermodal well cars.
Menards did a great job on these will have to pick up a few. I was watching the movie "Heat of the Night" and it has a good shot of the car carriers and other railroad scenes.
The freight train shows at 22.40 into the movie.
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