What is it and just how many cars can this little thing pull?

Paul,

That looks like a TrackMobile. Lionel has made them with TMCC - neat little things. 

www.trackmobile.com

Well, looks like the Trackmobile can pull/push at least 9 gravel hoppers.  Just not fast and probably not on any kind of grade.

Keeping them moving is the easy part.  Getting them moving or stopping, that's the hard part.

Don't forget, when starting to move a string of cars, you actually start moving one car at a time before the whole string begins to move.  Inertia then helps to move things along.

Rusty

The real thing has a surprising amount of tractive effort for a little unit.  After all, the little thing weighs over 25 tons!  50,850 |bs.

Trackmobile Titan

The ad says "Marmon Group/Berkshire Hathaway Co."  I'm thinking Warren Buffet in the Trackmobile business!

You can get it to move. It's the stopping that hurts.

Take it from one who has overloaded a Mack or Reo a time or three. My last overload was something I should have never gotten away with though. 290 horses against 146,000 pounds.

I can never find the famous 4 Aces loco being pulled by women when I need it here.

It's top speed is about 13 MPH, and I suspect they move stuff around the yard at a fraction of that.  In addition, remember that the cars have air brakes, it's not like the locomotive has to stop them with no help.  I really think it is more getting them moving.

As long as the track has little or no grade, it should be able to handle a load like that. I would not bet on adding many more, though.

Here is a shot of Lionel's TMCC equipped rendition. No sound, but both couplers fire. It's a whole lot of fun playing with it!

Chris

LVHR

I have one of the Lionel ones as well.  The funny part is they even duplicated the slow top speed in the model, it's no speed demon on the rails.   OTOH, I put four passenger cars behind it and it had no problem hauling them around.

The picture that started this thread brings up a question I've had: I have some new Lionel 3-bay diecast hoppers. They're very detailed, and have a working spring-loaded "door" at the bottom of each bay. When such hoppers get unloaded in real life, I assume there's some automatic mechanism that triggers each bay door to open. Do all three bays unload at once? Does anyone have a picture of the mechanism that triggers the opening? I'd love to model this, but have never seen such an unloading mechanism or operation.

   Bob A.

Bob here are some pictures I posted a couple of weeks ago that will give you a better idea of the unloading process.

Thanks's for the pictures. This unit is a new one on me.

Hi Bob,

The vast majority of hopper car doors are still opened by hand.  Here's a YouTube video showing a Track Mobile moving no less than 13 loaded hoppers that are manually opened.

There some newer methods that make the job far less physically demanding.  Here's a new system that is added to the cars that makes use of brake system pressure to operate the doors pneumatically.