This be obvious to most of you but not to me. Why does United Parcel have 28 ft containers on 28 ft chasis? Do they ever seperate the box from the chasis and put them in well cars? Thanks in advance.
I may be only partially correct, but its my understanding that UPS does send some trailers by rail, but as a complete trailer - never by box off of chassis.
Yes, the boxes go by *specialist* stack car and only in certain routes, this ensures they don't run out of cars or chassis! The cars are standalone Husky Stacks with 56' wells, and can take 4 of these 28' UPSU/FSTU boxes. In HO scale Railpower Products does a model of the stack car, along with the boxes & chassis, Walthers also did the chassis & boxes. Here's some info that may help: TTX webpage, then click on the DTTX link This shows BN-America boxes loaded, which I believe were fairly short lived. Freightcar webpage shows one of the 56' well empty on the last pic on the page. Rail Power Products photo of their kit built up. Plano have lots of prototype pics of one of these cars on their website. Shows the nice mix of FSTU (white) and UPSU (grey) boxes you get as well. Hope that helps. [ 23 May 2002, 21:41: Message edited by: Martyn Read ]
Matt has one of the Railpower ones in HO with four containers. A very impressive car. As I already make the containers, I am thinking it may be a good idea to do this car in N scale.
I'd thought about getting a couple of RPP ones for the front of my piggyback set, as it already has loads of UPS equipment in it already! But that train will become enough for two trains if I'm not careful! I keep finding cool cars to add to it (i'm working on an NS 52' piggyback flat now) An N scale version sounds quite good fun, and with the boxes available already should be quite a good project. Nice idea!
