In the March 2006 issue of Trains Magazine is an article, “How heavy can freight cars get,” by Bob Tuzik, and it is a real eye-opener. Railroads went from cars with a total weight of 263,000 pounds to 286,000 pounds and are now talking about going up to 315,000 pounds. Tuzik, who writes very informative articles for Trains Magazine and Railway Age, reveals that increasing the weight standard of cars is more than just beefing up the springs and increasing rail weight. Obviously, some bridges can’t hold as many cars if they’re heavier, but even that is more complicated than it might seem.

Out in the desert of Colorado is the Facility for Accelerated Service Testing (FAST) and its 2.7 mile long High Tonnage Loop track. This is all part of the jointly owned Transportation Test Center. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) shares management of the TTC with the Association of American Railroads’ (AAR) wholly owned subsidiary, Transportation Test Center, Inc. (TTCI). The whole thing is 52 square miles of insatiable curiosity near Pueblo, Colorado.

Their FAST track provides bridges, soft and marshy sections, and plenty of other on-line experiments. They could have made the loop longer, but they wanted to concentrate the constant pounding of trains into as small an area as possible so that they could see faster wear on car and track components. When they had “incidents,” instead of clearing the mainline, they took a CSI approach. Broken wheels, snapped axles, and crunched rails are studied microscopically until the exact problems can be pinpointed. The results are fed back into American railroads, improving material, inspection, and maintenance.

I learned some interesting things while reading the article. First, almost every inch of track in our rail system can be rated by how many tons pass over it in a year. Most of it is measured in million gross tons. For example, in the year 2004, some 255 million gross tons passed over the main track of the three between Gibbon and North Platte, Nebraska. The two other tracks along there carried nearly as much. As one looks at this loading, the implications of increasing freight car total weight from 286 to 315 thousand pounds becomes profound.

But this increase doesn’t come for free. Building up a line to handle it requires heavier rail, better ties and roadbed, and perhaps the rebuilding of some bridges. Accelerated wear attacks cars and rail lines, and railroads have to look at every part of the rail line very closely.

While I found all of this to be fascinating reading, I wasn’t sure what it would mean to model railroaders, beyond some new freight car designs. Then I stumbled into the issue of switches and diamonds. It seems that frog and crossing points suffer accelerated wear while also damaging wheels. The problem is due to the gaps. Since most model railroad trackage has enlarged gaps to accommodate larger-than-scale wheels and flanges, we suffer more rocking and clattering than the prototype roads. I don’t like the way my trains run through some of my switches, but the problem is more than the brand of the switch. I have built up the bottom of flangeways and reduced the problem.

It seems that railroads and FRA are also interested in this effect. In fact, this may just be a case of real railroads learning from model railroads. The wheel flange can be allowed to ride on the bottom of the flangeways and keep the wheel tread from dropping into the gap. Model railroaders have explored this possibility for at least a half century. FAST has determined that occasional riding on wheel flanges is not detrimental to the wheel or the flangeway, but it does provide a smoother ride. It also can reduce wear at frogs and diamond points.

And that brings us back to model railroading. We have built up our flangeways sporadically and could do that across the board — but we have a problem. To make this work in a given scale, not only would we need switches and crossings with built-up flangeways, we would also need consistent flanges. NMRA has given us the RP-25 standard, but some products do not adhere to it. Some are too large, though those days are mostly over. Others employ “fine scale” flanges that not only have tracking problems but also couldn’t take advantage of our “ride-on” flangeways. However, fine scale and oversized flanges are the exception, not the rule, and they represent only a small number of models.

In Germany, I saw switches with closing frogs, providing another solution, though one that is far more complicated and expensive. I didn’t get a chance to discover what they did at diamond crossings; something would have to pop up and fill in the gap. Diamonds are some of the most damaging gaps in all of railroading, and ride-on flangeways are just about the only reasonable solution.

I propose that model railroading take a page from real railroading and deliver “system” track components with ride-on flangeways. NMRA’s RP-25 is the most heavily modeled flange standard and should also spawn a line of switches and crossing diamonds where the bottom of the flangeways ramp-up to RP-25 standards. To my knowledge, none of the major track producers are constructing flangeways to this standard, but such a change would be easy enough.

For those who have older, deeper-flanged models, the flangeways could perhaps be ramped up to the gap such that deeper flanges could ride up smoothly. The goal of all of this is smoother-running trains. It is what we all want, but we are a long way from making it happen ourselves. RP-25 is an HO scale standard, and HO is the most standard-compliant of the many scales. It’s a good place to start.