Re: Box Car 4300

One of the issues with the design is it doesn't absorb buffing (compression) forces. When you push on the coupler, it doesn't take much to bury the coupler into the striker plate. When we ran John Craft's mega trips, we set up a couple of the box outfit cars for riders, covered the windows to make them look like boxccars, and put them ahead of the open gon. The helper was cut in between the gon and the caboose, with the outfit cars a car ahead of the helper shoving it's heart out on the rear. After a few days of that, I noticed the striker plate on the cars bent inward and the wooden block behind it was pretty much turning to mulch and sawdust.

Mental note to self - that's why they put outfit cars behind the helper. Let's not do that again.....

Looking at the pic of 04982, you can see the coupler has made contact with the striker plate, and the wood block behind it is falling apart. 04982 was one of the car we used on Craft's trips, along with 04407 and 04258.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2018 12:04PM by Earl.