Page 27 of Southern Railway Through Passenger Service by Greg Stout shows what looks like a Flexi-Van flatcar on the rear eng of a passenger train. Did Southern have Flexi-Van containers or could standard containers be loaded on Flexi-Van Flats? Thanks! bhowe6
Yes, just like the HO models put out by Walthers. Do not have a copy of the book you mentioned, but an awful lot of secondary Southern passenger trains during the '60's and '70's ran with quite a few piggy backs tacked on the end.
I don't believe standard containers would work on the Flexi-vans, since the flexi-van containers were really semi trailers with the wheels removed, which of course was a specialized unit. Containers would not have the correct mounting apparatus. That was really the thing that doomed the Fexi-vans....you had to have the wheel sets to put back on the trailers at every location you wanted to send one. The main use of the flexi's seems to have been mail, and when the USPS cancelled mail service with the railroads, they pretty much doomed them. The idea of the flexi-vans was to lower the profile of the "trailers" so they blended in with the passenger cars they usually ran with creating less wind resistance at high speeds.
