I am now working from home, at least that is the idea, but I have really been
goofing off
the last six weeks and should get back to real stuff. But until then...
Slack action. I have the S Helper Service couplers on my ore cars, they are
designed to
have "space" inside the knuckle and the back of the coupler body so when I pull
out a long
train, I get slack action. I "roughly measured the slack action between cars;
with the SHS
couplers I get about 3 scale inches of slack action, the Kadee about 7 scale
inches. The
SOO Line just went by, I was not able to get the engineer's attention to see if
he would let
me measure the slack action between two cars so I can not tell you what the
2008
prototype measurement will be. Perhaps I can get the Minnesota Transportation
Museum
to let me try something like this with a few of their cars but that would be on
older
equipment so the measurement would be different. I run 6-8 car trains up the
branch
line and 15-20 car trains on the main, both couplers provide the illusion of
slack action. I
regularly run 40 car ore trains and I get a nice slack action effect with the
SHS couplers, I
am not going to test the slack action look by changing out all of the couplers
but it seems
likely that I would get about (4 scale inches time 39 joints) somewhere in the
neighborhood of 10-13 scale feet of additional slack action. All of this is
relative; from an
engineering point of view all things scale down perfectly but visually, that is
not always the
case. I found over the years when sculpting commemoratives that some small
detail
needed to be a touch over proportion to give the visual effect. Engineers
might strongly
disagree with this observation which is fine. At the end of the day, we all
have our own
railroads, we all see things a bit different and it all comes down to what
compromises we
are willing to make.
Hey Ben, good post, I hope you are coming over to the PPSSW meeting tonight.
Is this a
new e-mail address? Ben is a member of the PPSSW known for his extraordinary
trackwork, reminds me of the workmanship I have seen on Dick Karnes's layout.
Speaking
of the uniqueness of each of our railroads, there is a famous spot on Ben's
layout where
one of his cats lost its "Little Frisky's cat num-num", the town that is now in
this spot has
a french sounding name, something like "Cat Barf" but you know more exotic.
Final note; as a retired field artillery officer, I must point out to Ed, that
close also counts
in the field artillery. Now really guys, I need to get some work done.
Ken
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