ho scale

[no1jrtech]

I'm new at this train building so my question is can the ho scale Chattanooga train climb hills?

[Doneldon]

#1-

Welcome to model railroading and this board. I'm sure you'll find many aspects of model railroading which interest you; it's worked for me for nearly 60 years. There is a learning curve, as with any activity, but be patient with yourself and you'll soon find you have hidden talents which you can expand with your trains.

The Chattanooga is an inexpensive, train set locomotive. As such, it isn't very powerful. However, it can pull a few cars up a reasonable grade. As you may know, grades present significant challenges to railroads. Real trains are very heavy -- even a 10,000 ton (20,000,000 pounds) train isn't considered to be particularly large -- so grades are minimized as much as possible. This means finding a route which permits a train to climb as little as possible over the longest possible distance. By today's standards, a two-percent grade would be considered very steep on a real railroad. To avoid even this comparatively mild slope (track rising two feet in every 100 feet of travel) railroads will build bridges, embankments and  tunnels, and blow whole hillsides and cliffs out of the way.

A two-percent grade is considered to be pretty easy on a model railroad. In this case, think of rising two inches in 100 inches of travel. Three percent is common and four percent can be found on lots of layouts. A locomotive which can haul, say, ten cars on a straight, level track may manage only three or four on a three-percent hill. So what does that mean in real terms? Well, a three-percent grade is about the steepest which should be considered for a model railroad, even given that we frequently build our whole world on a 4'x8' sheet of plywood and we want some mountains and maybe a bridge over a river or another rail line. The good news is that you can have mountains and bridges on that 4'x8' and still stay under the three-percent practical limit. (There is an exception to the this limit: the steep and winding courses of mining and logging railroads which have specially designed equipment, including powerful and dexterous geared locomotives which can handle such terrain, if only at very low speeds.)

In HO, which I assume you have based on your query about the Chattanooga, you need your tracks to be about 3.5 inches apart vertically. That means 3.5 inches from railhead to railhead or roadbed to roadbed or from any point on one track to the same point on the other. This distance must be increased if, for example, you are modeling a bridge with part of its structure below the rails. There are some tricks to making this work but you need to keep that three-percent maximum in mind. Three percent means a three-inch rise in 100 inches of track, or about one-quarter inch per nine-inch piece of sectional track.

Again, welcome to model railroading. Keep us up to date on your progress.
                                                                                                                -- D

[jward]

to answer your question, I tried my unmodified Chattanooga train on my layout. I have an over and under loop, with a climb of 3% up one side of the hill, and 4% up the other. these grades are approximately 1/4" of rise per track section (3%) and 3/8" rise per section (4%).

my unmodified train of engine, 3 cars and caboose pulled the hills in both directions, but barely made it up the 4% side.

my advice would be to keep the grade to 3% or less for this particular engine. one observation is that my diesels generally pull much better, 5 or more cars up the 4%.