Circle the Wagons

And now for something completely different. Its odd making a model of something you know very little about. 

I’m becoming more familiar with the locomotive types seen on the Gotthard but the freight trains are just colourful images on my camera and in my mind. So today I approached Mr Google and Mr Flickr and enquired about European wagons. 

It’s complicated.

So lets start with something oddly lacking in Z - modern Euro intermodal equipment. From my observations, carted items include:

• Containers - mainly 40 feet long, but plenty of 20s, some odd-sizes like 30 and 45ss
• Tanktainers, which are a variation of the above carrying liquids or gasses (and in various lengths themselves).
• Swapbodies - these are often curtainsided boxes with solid bases and flimsy tops that get offloaded onto a truck trailer chassis - again all sizes
• Truck trailers - the true piggyback train in American parlance

There seem to be specialist piggyback cars - such as on the Winner Spedition train - wide funky-sided pocket wagons with no ISO twistlocks, and the HUPAC train - whose low-wide wagons seem to traverse the Gotthard at night. Some piggyback cars also seem to take swapbodies perched on top.

Winner Spedition train - piggybacked road trailers in deep well wagons

For the containers and most swapbodies, I can see a myriad of types, presumably exacerbated by a wide variety of manufacturers from many countries. Prominent are:

• A long skinny-silled wagon thinner in width than an ISO container, with a prominent data board at the left end
• A deep silled wagon (some with an underframe like NZ’s old CW wagons, others with more angular underframes, some with and some without ribbing under twistlocks), which is also thinner than an ISO container
• A double unit articulated version of the above 
• A wagon with funky bendy side sills that’s wider than a container
• A double articulated set of the above.
• I’m sure there are more (including the wild Megaswing and similar) but these seem common types

The single unit wagons seem long enough to take a 40 plus a 20 foot container. Quite prominent on the container wagons are enough twistlocks to take a seemingly endless variety of load combos - the twistlocks not in use for a particular load seem to fold down out of the way. 

Three swapbodies of various sizes on deep-sided cars with tanktainers following

Articulated/double version of the deep-sided car 45 foot container

Skinny-sider, with 30 footers?

Various sizes of tanktainers - the near on a funky-sider

Swapbodies balanced on wider cars using little yellow stakes....?! Its all a mystery...

The skinny-siders like the pair passing below (which might be called “sgnss” wagons according to Mr Google), seems like a decent place to start, albeit with containers on top to make things a little easier...