OK, well, I'm reopening this zombie thread because I got my two UPS trailers before Christmas and the 28545 flatcar (TTX yellow) arrived today. Wow. Almost a year later.... Well, here's what I can tell you for sure. After 30 minutes of testing.. 1) Nice detail, decent paint and lettering, VERY yellow.. a little too yellow for my liking. 2) Metal wheels, MT trucks, MT couplers...BUT, 3) Everything is body-mount. Now here is where it gets wierd. There's instructions in the liner saying that the couplers are TRUCK MOUNTED and how to convert the car to body mounts, and there's a bag of parts (rather unexplained). Looks like 4 container racks and two fold-down hitches. They don't look like fold-down hitches because the holes in the 'fifth wheel' are as big as in the up hitches, which makes no sense at all when you think about it. Now there's obviously no design intent on these particular cars to ever have truck-mounted couplers. I don't consider that a sin...but.... The MT couplers on it are old-design, they are NOT RDA. That means this thing's gonna pop under stress, and also push the trip pins down for derailments. Guaranteed. While I don't necessarily expect an 85' flat with body-mounts to negotiate a 9 3/4" curve, the BOX LINER SAYS IT DOES. Well, it sure doesn't - apparently this is an obsolete standard box liner. As a matter of fact, on my first testing, it piled up on 11" curves. Really?? So I put together a couple pieces of 11" 2520 for checking, and sure enough, it lightly grinds the wheels into the cutouts for the flanges and also the centerbeam. If there's any kink at all in 11", this will find it instantly. Apparently I have one in a hidden reverse loop, great.... I went back and checked the Trainworx site...there's no mention of body mounts, minimum radius, etc., etc., and still no photos of the actual cars. There's no indication on the box of the radius. I see on my e-tailers site that these cars are sold out. Hmmm. Maybe I should just auction it. Temptation is certainly there. Now I'm not one to start a full-on gripe thread, and I'm as good or better with a dremel and an Xacto knife as the next guy. I can probably get this car working on my 11" curves, fix the coupler problem, etc. After all, I've converted old Trix container flats to piggybacks, and that's just nuts. Or, I could trade it for what's behind door #2. I'm stubborn enough I'll fix it, I suppose, but right out of the box I'm not particularly happy tonight. As a note, I have a 13-car train of 85' flats powered by 3 Katos that sails around my layout without a problem; MT, Con-Cor, Trix, Peter Harris' cars (n scale kits) and they work flawlessly. I suppose if you have wide curves you'll be OK, but that RDA thing is gonna getcha with a longer train, so I decided to post this anyway.
I got 4 I have not tried out yet. Havent even took them out of the box. OK.....what is RDA couplers??????
randgust, Have you e-mailed Pat about your concerns? He may be unaware of the non-RDA (reverse draft angle) couplers. I thought MT only did RDA's now anyway. And if you are that dissatisfied, return it.
Stubborn won. I got out the Dremel and the Xacto. Cut a shade off of the center sill and a shade out of the wheel pockets, that's all it took and the car rolls through 11" radius now unhindered and will make it through my one 9 3/4 industrial siding, scraping, but doesn't derail. The odd part is that it's right on the edge there, it wouldn't have taken much in design mod to make sure it didn't scrape on 11". Trimmed the coupler knuckles to RDA shape and stress-tested them, it's been a while since I did that, wow, like maybe five years! But that did what it usually does, fixes that little issue immediately. Gave it a 'special train' treatment through the entire layout.... that went well, and promoted it to the Super C three cars deep out of 14, so it's going to get yanked hard there, and it ran fine. I do like the metal wheels, and no evidence of rail climbing or issues due to the body mounts, coupler swing is fine. So other than the fact that it's a glorious glowing yellow in a sea of weathered cars...but that's me. I do wonder if the low-shank coupler for the MT flatcars EVER got redesigned to be RDA. Anybody every seen one? I purchased my MT flats so long ago it was before this became and issue and I'd fixed them by that time anyway. As far as for the RDA/non RDA thing.... see this:http://home.earthlink.net/~bhender730/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/rda_mt.jpg Basically the symptoms (and problem) is that if you either have pop-aparts on heavy trains, or unexplained trip-pin hangs/derails where the coupler height and pin height is set correctly, this is likely the issue, and if you're good with an Xacto you can fix a non-RDA shape to an RDA shape in about 15 seconds. Consider it circumcision for couplers, kinda.
I couldn't find a 'contact' on the TrainWorx site but there is an email at the bottom, so I will pass on my observations here - particularly the RDA. I think that's only worth something because there are more productions runs on the way. And it does sorta sting that the announcement date by MT on the RDA 'discovery' was 1996 - people, this is now almost sixteen years ago! While there isn't a photo link to the original run (the April 2011 TTX run that I have) there is a photo link to the TTX brown run that has been pre-ordered now: http://www.train-worx.com/ps85.trailertrain.htm That shows the yellow car at the top, good representation of what is actually there but it is a 'brighter' yellow firsthand and the plastic detail is cast in bright yellow. The add-on details are very nice, but what I really like is the low deck. You can 'sort of' assume body-mounts by looking at that photo, but I still think that that issue and the curve radii should be clearly disclosed. I didn't say much about the trailers, I got a pair of 40' UPS drop bottom and they are very nice indeed, particularly that they are light - unlike the cast resin or lead monsters of the past. The only odd thing is the size of the trailer post - quite large in diameter in comparison to anybody else.
I just received my 6 car pre-order and noticed how nice and smooth they rolled while putting the first 4 cars on the track. Car number 5 did not roll very well and made a scraping noise. I checked everything over and was about to pull my hair out, what little I have left and then I noticed it. The trucks are offset and have to be installed correctly or the wheels will rub. I turned the truck around and it rolled just like the ones before it.
I did get a nice email response back from Pat at TrainWorx. "The insert that ended up in the 85 foot flat car is for the 86 foot auto parts car, this is clearly a mistake as you noted. The UP and TLCX also have these inserts. " "Since the beginning Trainworx cars have been designed for body mount couplers but we have always delivered the product ready to run on 9 3/4" radius track. We have done this by jacking the cars up with shims so that the trucks will swing under the sills of cars and use truck mounted couplers. We then include instructions on how to convert the car back to a scale model as designed. Unfortunately product reviewers never read the instructions or notice the shims and comments like "car sits too high" end up in reviews. After years of doing the conversions for customers who do not like to do the conversion themselves, customers begging that the models come as designed, and seeing cars that have not been converted running on scale track we had to make a decision the other way. Last year we made and announcement at the national N scale convention, in our news letter, and in all scale magazines that would print it, that our cars would be delivered as designed with body mount couplers and that the 9 3/4" radius guys would have to make the conversions on the cars." "The parts bag should probably have some explanation but I must say that you are the first person that I have come across that actually reads the insert label. When you have one hitch in the up position and one in the down position with a much smaller hole it really draws your attention to how large the hole in the up hitch is. For this reason the up and down hitches are the same. I did invest some time in this decision. I am pretty sure that Micro-Trains only re-tooled the 1015 and 1025 coupler knuckles to be RDA, the rest of their coupler line stayed the same. " OK, so I did have to chuckle that I very well may be the first person to actually look at the box insert! The only thing I'm still observing is that unlike the previous 85' cars that had been offered, this is a very unfriendly cast metal frame to convert back to truck-mounts. Probably unnecessary anyway in my judgement. The only thing that I'm still puzzled on is the dragging/derailing on 11" radius I saw, your mileage may vary. And as far as for the RDA thing, good lord, is that true? If it is true, that's probably the reason why people are still hacking off MT trip pins unnecessarily to prevent derailments and still having false uncoupling. Me thinks it's time to put a photo 'how to' together and maybe a YouTube video on how to fix couplers to an RDA face...
