New on the layout are the modern Atlas Tropicana Trinity Reefers.
I first saw these in an ad in Model Railroader last year and went on the hunt for them only to discover that they were nearly impossible to find. They had been out of stock for so long that they just weren’t listed in inventory – not out of stock or back ordered – not listed at all.
That meant that the only way I was going to find them was by going on the hunt to some of the small hobby shops in the hope that I could find a few unsold units in their piles of rolling stock…
I specifically wanted the Tropicana cars, I could find the Union Pacific cars in a few places, but I don’t run much UP stuff so I didn’t think the UP cars would ever look quite right. Besides, i really like how colorful the Tropicana cars are with their green lettering and giant orange on them.
A few weeks ago I stumbled across two cars while visiting Madison Hobby Stop in Madison WI. I hadn’t been planning on visiting but since I was in the area I figured I’d make the stop and imagine my surprise when I found two of the Tropicana Trinity Reefers on the shelf. You can see a picture of them in my last post about the revised West Side and changes to the Long Bridge. A few weeks later I found the rest of the model run including the Naked Juice car on Amazon.
I’m a big fan of Amazon and while I buy a lot from the site, I don’t buy model train stuff there often. It’s a site of last resort for model train stuff – usually the pricing isn’t great, and if I can support a train store and get better pricing than Amazon it’s a not brainer to go somewhere else. But every once in a while a seller on Amazon has something I can’t find anyplace else and in this case it was two sellers, one listed as Y2Play which oddly enough appears to be Music Emporium in Altoona PA (weird I know) and the other is Nicholas Smith Trains – who is also a Model Railroader advertiser… Oddly enough, I couldn’t actually find these cars listed on Nicholas Smith Trains own website!
The cars are well detailed. Whether it’s the grab irons, ladders, or the refrigeration units everything looks really good.
The cars do feature body mount couplers, which given that the two axel trucks are set back from the end of the cars it makes sense. Interestingly (to me at least) the couplers aren’t black but brown. I’m not sure why Atlas elected to do that but it’s a notable detail. The couplers however have been a problem for me.
The photo above is one of the reefers coupled to the front coupler of one of my BLI EMD SD40-2 locomotives. I have a pair of the SD40-2s that I typically run tail to tail, I do that because it allows me to always run short hood forward no matter which direction the pair is traveling, but it does meant that anything the pair is pulling is normally connected to the front coupler. While the coupler height is off a little on both it’s normally not an issue – but as you can see above it’s a problem with the reefers. Even flipping one of the SD40-2s around so the pair is running nose to tail and the reefers are coupled to the rear coupler there’s still an issue with coupler height. The issue is bad enough that the string of Tropicana cars is uncoupling on the two grades AND as they make the turn onto the long bridge from the West Side.
While I don’t have an NMRA gauge to check, I think the problem is with the Atlas reefers because the other problem I’m running into is the trip pin snagging on some of the banked corners. I think the car is tilting on the corner causing the trip pin to occasionally snag on the track ties. Typically the issue is with the second car in the string.
Also, despite being identical, one car, the 3176 seems to wobble a little more than the rest particularly when it’s in the middle of the string. As a result if it’s in the middle of the string it’s more prone to derailing than the other cars. moving it to the end of the string appears to be sufficient to make the problem go away. But it’s frustrating.
I’ve also found what a solution for the retaining walls that I needed to build on the West Side and part of the East Side… Amazon carries 1/35 scale clay bricks, and that’s what I’ve built most of the way around the outside of the West Side incline.
At 1/35 scale they’re much larger than N Scale bricks, but I think they work well as large stones instead. These are smaller than the ones that I used on the old layout, but I think the smaller scale works well.