Do Atlas standard hight containers fit into Deluxe Innovations Twin Stacks? I have yet to buy any of their containers but I am tempted to fill up some unused cars. TIA....
No, not in the bottom position. But, Fox Valley has acquired the tooling for the Deluxe containers. Carter
Thanks Carter..... That would have caused problems. That's awesome that DI's products will continue on, been a fan of them since their early days....
Maybe somebody can enlighten me but why are there such differences in containers, or car widths, among manufacturers that only certain containers will fit a specific car? I don't think this is a problem in the 1 to 1 world so why is it in the modeling world?
I just checked and the samples I have do work in the bottom well. Now, my Twin Stack goes back to almost the beginning of Deluxe Innovations, so if any changes were made it could be a reason, but from what I can test, they work.
I suspect that it's just slight variations in dimensions between manufacturers and moulds. A few thousandths of an inch on an 8 foot wide container doesn't matter very much, but the same variation on a model of 0.6" could be problematic. The original poster might find this page from the Deluxe Innovations web site useful: http://www.deluxeinnovations.com/rolling/rollingtwinstax03.html.
The specific containers I was speaking of (not named so as to be polite) are the older concor 40 footers, as they were wrongly sized at 102" rather than 96" by the original manufacturer to make them use the doors from the 48' foot container by the same builder. Silly, but such was the state of the art back then. Recently, I tried some of the newer boxes coming out of odd brands from the east, and found them to be closer to 1:150 than 1:160, and therefore they also did not fit. The Atlas 40' containers seem to fit fine, as one might expect of a US N Scale designer. Setting up and shimming a mold is a black art, and from time to time the plastic doesn't react the same way that you designed it to react. this can cause very slight differences in sizes, and if one builds to scale, the fit becomes tighter. In the case of the Twinstack which is and always has been hand assembled, .002 bowed in on the car and .001 set up difference or plastic non-shrink on the container add up to a very tight fit. As long as you don't force it, you can make it work IF the dimensions are scale to begin with. George
That is only to be expected. Japanese N-scale tends to be 1:150 while English N-gauge is normally 1:148 and the containers come nowhere near stacking, let alone fitting into well cars. It's the same as HO v. OO, our rolling stock is built to a smaller loading gauge and locomotives needed to be made to a larger scale to be able to fit a workable mechanism into them but we use the same track.
Paul, I did not want to force the containers into the wells. The width was fine, but the length seemed to be the cause of the binding. Maybe all I need to do is a little sanding inside each of the well ends. I have an early undecorated Twin Stack I will try to see if I can pinpoint where the binding is occurring. Carter
