A Frustrating Night

[Joe323]

It was a VERY frustrating night last night on my AK & J railway.  I have a string of Athearn Gunderson Maxi Well IV cars that kept derailing when I sent them out as a consist hauling several double stack 40' containers.  This consist has ran well in the past but this time it just kept derailing on mainline curves obviously bringing other traffic to a halt.  Has anyone else had problems with these cars? 
I finally gave up and removed them from service so that other trains could proceed.

[jonathan]

Joe,

That's not much info to go on.  I have had derailment issues with a well car in the past.  This may not be your problem, but here we go:

1. My well car would derail when it was the lead car behind my locomotive.  I double head two large locos; a Dash-9 and an SD70MAC.  When I put the locos tail-to-tail, the nose of the second loco swings a little wider, derailing the lead well car on 22" radius curves--no problem on 24".  Problem was solved by having both locos face forward.  A well car is pretty long, compared to say a box car.  How tight are your curves?

2. Well cars ride very low, close to the rail.  I find they can be finicky.  I spent an unreasonable amount of time adjusting car and coupler heights.  Felt like I was constantly playing with fiber washers and shank locations, to get just the right combination.

3.  I don't know where you live, or where your layout sits, but we are in the middle of a pretty hot August at my place.  Is it possible your rails have expanded, even slightly causing a hump in your trackwork?  As I said, these cars are finicky in my experience.

4.  Even with a plastic container load, these cars are light.  Perhaps a little weight in the containers is in order.

5.  Oh, sometimes a bit of schmutz ends up on the track you were not aware of.  It happens.

May not help you, but that's my experience.  I once had dreams of a long intermodal train on my layout.  My dreams have changed.

Regards,

Jonathan

[Joe323]

Jonathan:

Thanks for the suggestions I think I am going to proceed as follows:

First I did a lot of landscaping on my layout of late so a though cleaning is in order

I did find and correct a misaligned rail at one part.  Tonight I'm going to check the track for humps as you are correct well cars ride extremely low esp double stacks. 

The cars are extremely light the though has occurred to me to

Weight the containers down to bring the cars to NMRA specs.  it also occur ed to me that I may not be able to for that reason run these cars in a mixed consist, as some of my other types of rolling stock are quite a bit heavier.  I'd rather not fight the coupler battle these cars are designed to run in a consist of at least 2 (the interior cars are joined together by drawbars and it seems like those are the ones derailing.

Of course none of this was going to happen at 1 AM last night when I closed up shop for the night.