Daylight Cars

[UnumProvident101]

no

[Doneldon]

UP101-

Having looked back through your minimalist posts, I think I have your, and your dad's, answer. Foot long passenger cars will not work on 22" radius curves if they are close coupled. Either the corners of the cars will contact one another or the couplers will exert enough sideways pressure that you'll have derailments, uncoupling problems or both. This can be especially disruptive when you have Talgo -- meaning "truck-mounted" -- couplers such as are found on many Con-Cor passenger cars. I don't know if your train has Talgos since you have been playing I've Got a Secret with us, but I'm betting that you do and that's why your dad doesn't like the lengths of the couplers he has.

Go to the Kadee website and get knuckle couplers with long shanks and draft gear (the plastic boxes which hold the couplers). Then clip or saw the long shanks of the Talgo trucks off, mount new draft gear to the floors of the cars and install the Kadee couplers in them. While you are at the Kadee site, purchase a coupler height gauge unless you already have one. It makes installing couplers correctly and within spec much, much easier than trying to guess or imagine how to measure vertically from the top of a rail to a point at the center of the rails.

Model manufacturers use Talgo trucks to help their cars go around tight curves, and to save some money, but they are really more of a curse than a solution. They aren't too bad when pulling trains around a layout with moderate curves but throw in tight curves (yes, 22" is still tight for scale passenger cars even though regular freight trains negotiate 22" with ease) or try to back a train up, even on straightaways, and their weakness reveals itself.

Look at it this way. You have 22" curves, just about 160 feet in the real world. Your foot-long cars scale out to full length streamline passenger equipment, somewhere in the range of 80 to 85 feet. That means you are trying to turn those long cars in a little less than twice their own length. If you sketch this on a piece of paper you'll see how preposterous that is. Now try a 40' box car on the same curve. The curve is four times the length of the car and the overhangs and side forces are substantially eliminated.

Or think of your car. The one you drive, that is. It will turn 90^o in twice its own length, but barely. And it has wheels which turn very far compared to what trains can do. If your car is pulling a camper or a U-Haul, you'd better have a very long tongue on the trailer or its front corners will hit the rear corners of your car when you make a tightest possible turn with it.

Just as you have to adjust your driving when pulling a trailer around sharp turns, you have to adjust your model trains on tight turns. That means no Talgos, long shanks and moderate speeds.
                                                                                  -- D

[UnumProvident101]

My dad does have long shank couplers and we had the problem on the 18" inch curves

[jbrock27]

Micah, does it make sense to you, that if you have trouble on 22" curves, you are bound to have trouble on 18" curves running the same equipment?