Since only Walthers, Con-Cor and Athearn make them, and they all have truck-mounted couplers anyway, I believe they all can.
I currently have a Athearn Husky Stack that I had to remove plastic around the truck to keep it from derailing. With out modification, the trucks wouldn't turn enough.
That fits with my experience with the old MDC husky's that the Athearns are based on. Those also had trouble on 11" curves. They are made too close to prototype dimensions. The Walthers do work fine. The various articulated well cars also work fine as far as I know.
If you are going to go Walther's, you should figure in the cost of Micro Trains trucks with couplers. Walther's are not much good without this change. They don't roll good, and they have the old Rapido couplers. Once this change is made, they are very good. Not too much detail (nothing to fall off), but good nevertheless. I have a few of these stand alones as well as serveral of the 5 car sets. The ConCors are too light but they come with weighted containers. I don't think they are available right now. I do not have any of the Athearns but I had a couple of the old Husky Stacks which Athearn bought and modified slightly. These, you had to cut away the end frame in order to mount MT's, plus they too were light.
There was a guy selling a bunch of the con cor cars with containers on ebay this week. I picked up 3 sets for $8.99 each. Looking forward to trying them out. Here's one of the listings Con-Cor N Twin-Stack Container Car BN America #62012 - eBay (item 370341741197 end time Mar-03-10 18:06:46 PST) He is a great seller, reasonable and fast shipping. I think he said he is almost done with all his n scale listings, has maybe one week left.
Don't even bother with Con-Cor anything. The cars are toylike cRapido junk. The containers are slightly over-scale. Compared to the quality of the new breed of N scale manufacturers (i.e. Deluxe, ExactRail, BLMA, Fox Valley, etc), Con-Cor is downright embarrassing. They don't deserve to produce N scale products.
Con-Cor's 48' and 53' containers are not over scale. Actually they are a bit under scale on the height. Their 45' and 40' containers are over-scale and won't fit in some wells.
MRL - I hear your Pain ! However - the Con-cor 'twin stack' model is the ONLY All Purpose husky stack on the market. They do need work - new wheels/couplers/trucks AND Weight, and there are several ways to make them better and usable/reliable. Etched metal detail sets are also available for them. When made reliable, they do add nice variety to our model fleets...... Steven
So either way, Con-Cor containers are NOT TO SCALE! 1:160 FAIL! :thumbs_down: I have one Con-Cor car in my entire rolling stock collection, an autorack car that looks rather dingy compared to the the finer MTL, Red Caboose, Atlas and Athearn autoracks that run in that train. The only reason I bought it was because a LHS had it on sale for $6 and I installed a FRED inside it. I've heavily weathered it to further hide the shame.
They are maybe 2 scale inches shorter than deluxe and Kato containers. I don't think it's a big fail and I'm sure many have never noticed. I have quite a few 48s and 53s and I think they look fine, and add variety among the other brands. No one else has made a 53' smoothside container either.
Well I think that it's highly ironic that the prototype, which is made to strict dimensional standards to be followed universally, isn't faithfully modeled by a certain company. DI, Kato and Walthers bothered to make them to scale, and all of them are manufactured in China, so what is Con-Cor's excuse?
Can someone tell me what '2 scale inches' is on a regular ruler...? 1/8"...1/16"...1/32"...1/64"...1/128". Just really curious...TIA .
2 scale inches = 2/160 actual inches = 1/80 actual inches. Pretty small. My question for Ben is: are there any smooth-side 53' containers in service? I don't recall ever seeing one. RE Con-Cor's excuse: the only one they need is that there are enough people who want to buy their products for them to stay in business. Many customers don't care about fidelity, period; others like Steven & Ben feel they offer a unique prototype that is either close enough or can be improved with some work, perhaps until something better comes along. I myself have gotten some mileage from their funnel flow tank cars with the GMM detail kit. I'd love a better funnel flow model, but these make a fun project. I might tackle one of their well cars in the same spirit, but it's not high on my list.
There were never many 53' smooth side containers in service and I doubt there are any today. In terms of the evolution of the domestic container, they were the first 53'ers and as such, continued with the popular smooth sided (sheet and post) design of the 48' container. APL was a big user and common on the UP/SP and Conrail, and Conrail also had a small fleet in the gorgeous Mercury scheme. The design was replaced by the corrugated sided steel container (Jindo etc) that APL/Pacer etc quickly acquired huge fleets of and the smooth sided designs disappeared with the 48' container. If you're a early 90's intermodal modeller (like me) than you really need some of these, especially for those APL/APC unit trains. Unfortunately, the CC model is all we have and I can't see that changing any time soon - there's other more popular styles (ie, more road names) that I believe manufacturers would consider before this one. Which is a shame, as I'd really like some better "Big Birds" than what we currently have on offer, but unfortunately considering all the other "no-brainers" in the intermodal world that we still don't have models of (Maxi-Is, Hunt containers, etc), it shouldn't be a surprise. http://www.matts-place.com/intermodal/part3/images/apcu530313.jpg http://www.matts-place.com/intermodal/part3/images/apcu530582.jpg http://www.matts-place.com/intermodal/part3/images/crmu231047.jpg J.
I'd love to hear a response from someone from Con-Cor (though I believe they're really not around anymore and everything's just distributed by Intermountain now), but I'm sure Bachmann has the same excuse. Only thing is, even though Bachmann has had a rep as a lowest-common-denominator model railroad company, at least to their credit they've made the attempt to improve their product with the Spectrum line and with, for example, the new versions of the Amfleet cars (disregarding the Rapidos though). Is Bachmann perfect now? Oh of course not, but I at least give them credit for trying.
