Six months ago I picked up the run of Atlas Tropicana and Naked Juice modern Trinity Reefers. Tracking down the entire run of road numbers wasn’t easy but as mentioned here, ultimately I managed to get them through a few sources.
When it comes to looks – they’re fantastic. Atlas did a great job with the details, unfortunately out of the box they’re not great runners.
The issue seems to be the body mount couplers – they’re just too low out of the box which leads to the trip pins snagging and causing derailments and cars randomly uncoupling. On the Centreville Railroad layout they were running so bad that I ended up parking them on the sidings around the layout out of frustration.
It turns out that the fix for the issue is fairly simple though, add a small washer between the truck and car body to raise the car body and its body mount coupler up by as little as 0.015″.
Kadee, as in the company that makes the old school “horn and hook” couplers has just the washers to do the trick. Kadee part #1681 are stainless steel 1-72 washers and Kadee part #208 are red insulating fiber washers and both are options as truck spacers. The red insulating fiber washers are a little bigger than the stainless steel washers so they’re a little easier to handle, but both work just fine.
Installation is as simple as popping off the truck mounting pin with your fingernail to remove the truck. Insert the pin back into the bottom of the track and place the washer on the pin on the top side of the truck. Line up the pin with the hole on the bottom of the car and press it all into place… Lather rinse and repeat for the other truck.
I coupled everything back up behind the pair of SD40-2s mentioned in the previous post and the first thing that was obvious, if the couplers weren’t now at the same height then they were pretty close.
In testing, they are much more reliable. The entire consist ran across all throttle ranges on the inner loop without any issues. No uncoupling and no derailing.
Things weren’t quite so smooth on the outer loop, but they were significantly better and the issues really seemed to be dependent on direction of travel. The first derailment occurred headed clockwise across the double crossover to shift from the inner to the outer loop, this one I think was speed related as the train was running at full speed.
Everything was fine clockwise on the outer loop up until I hit between 2/3 and 3/4 throttle and then I had cars at the end of the consist derailing in the West Station when they hit the double crossover even though it was set for straight through running.
Counter clockwise however was trouble free at all speeds. Previously I had cars uncoupling consistently on the West Incline, but now there were no issues at all at any speed. This weekend I also did some general track work around the switch into the industrial siding on the outer loop before the West Station. This was an area that’s been pretty troublesome when running most trains counter clockwise on the outer loop. I ground down the rail joints at the entrance to this switch, it turns out the joint was slightly out of alignment with a minor bump at the entrance to the switch. Grinding down the bump to smooth everything seems to have resolved the issues through there. Not only did the refers pass through without any issues, but so did the Metra gallery cars.