Scaletrains Coil Cars

[Tyrell Baskerville]

Inthe 1960s, the Ford Motor Company, collaborating with two Detroit-area railroads, created the modern coil steel car design. Over the years, several freight car manufacturers built similar cars, including Thrall Car Manufacturing which constructed these 48-foot, twin hood cars in the 1980s and 1990s. The first Thrall cars had a 100-ton capacity, but later versions were built to a 125-ton capacity. Wearing the protective hoods, the car can carry coils up to 7 feet in diameter. They can carry coils up to 10 feet with the hoods removed. The flat-top hoods from the first designs have been replaced with a rounded top design that is both easier to manufacture and is stronger.

Strip or sheet steel has long been a major component in the manufacturing of many different products including pipes, tanks, household appliances - both large and small, industrial shelving, machinery, freight cars, and especially automobiles. Cold-rolled or hot-rolled, varying in width from less than an inch to ten feet, and ranging in thickness from 1/64th of an inch to 1/4th of an inch, the steel was originally cut into sheets in customer specified lengths. After World War II, winding the steel strip into a coil almost completely replaced the sheets. The steel coil with 3,000 to 5,000 feet of steel is much easier to handle and transport than a stack of steel sheets. Coils are also far more versatile than a sheet that may be too long for one usage or too short for another.

The biggest challenge for railroads and the automobile industry, the primary user of coiled steel, was how to transport it efficiently. In the 1960s, the Ford Motor Company, working with the Detroit Toledo & Ironton and the Chesapeake & Ohio railroads, came up with the design of the coil steel car. The original design was a heavy-duty frame with two 24-foot troughs covered by hoods made of thin steel. The troughs and movable load dividers prevented the coils from rolling side-to-side or sliding while the hoods protected the coils from the weather. Several freight car builders built coil steel cars, including Thrall Car Manufacturing which built these 48-foot, twin hood cars in the 1980s and 1990s. The first Thrall cars had a 100-ton capacity, but later versions were built to a 125-ton capacity. Wearing the protective hoods on, the car can carry coils up to 7 feet in diameter. They can carry coils up to 10 feet with the hoods removed. The flat-top hoods from the first designs have been replaced with a rounded top design that is both easier to manufacture and is stronger.

Major online industries such as automobile manufacturing plants and steel mills require large numbers of railcars to keep their operations humming. Many of these cars are of specialized designs to meet the specific service needs of each industry. Steel mills typically utilize specialized rail cars throughout the manufacturing process. Hot bottle and coke cars are well known, but mills also need to deliver finished sheet steel to their customers in a damage-free environment.

In the past, coiled steel was shipped in open or covered gondolas, but was subject to shipping damage all too frequently. In response, purpose-built coil steel cars became dominant since the 1970s to transport steel coils. The purpose-built designs carried steel coils either transversely or longitudinally in cradles. Each cradle carried up to three coils, and was typically lined with wood and covered with a hood overhead to ensure safe transport.

ScaleTrains.com has recently released a finely scaled HO scale replica of a contemporary coil steel car based on a prototype first manufactured by the Thrall Car Company in 1995. With a single longitudinal cradle measuring 42 feet long, the new design utilized just a single insulated long hood, unlike earlier designs with two hoods over two separate shorter cradles. While the cradle itself has a 42-foot inside length, the entire car measures 47.5 feet over the end sills. All dimensions on the model mirror prototype drawings.

More than five thousand cars of this basic 42-foot design from Thrall Car Company have been produced since the 1990s. In 2001, Trinity Industries took over Thrall Car Company and continued manufacturing this design with minor refinements. The final examples were produced in 2012 for Norfolk Southern, capping a seventeen-year-long production run. These Thrall/Trinity 42-foot coil steel cars are actively plying the rails across North America today in a multitude of reporting marks and paint schemes.

ScaleTrains has invested significant time and resources to provide multiple tooling and detail variations to cover the many road- and order-specific details seen on these cars. There are three different body styles, six different hoods, three different sizes of steel coils, two styles of lifting bales, different handrail configurations and more.

Application of the stickers seems straightforward, but take the time to sort your coils and stickers by size before attaching the stickers. The adhesive on each sticker is also rather strong, so be sure you have each sticker aligned perfectly before affixing it permanently onto your coils. I found that a pair of tweezers makes this task much easier and much more precise than just using your fingers.

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