Driving home from a train show set up night when I saw an empty NS coal train going through Clairton, PA. The train was composed of double tubs but the last car was different. Instead of its 'tubs being parallel to the rails as all the other cars, this one had two rather large round tubs mounted perpendicular to the rails. It reminded me of a model track cleaning car with the large roller mounted between the trucks. The car was heavily weathered with only the area around the reporting marks being clean. The car number was NS10160. I have never seen a car like this ever. I could not get a photo as the train was going 40-45mph and I had some traffic lights to contend with. Can anyone shed some light on this?
Yes, Walthers number 10160 is marked NS. But it's a locomotive, not a weird hopper. And I hate to burst your bubble, but it's not N scale. It's HO.
Not sure this is useful but enter NS10160 into this CSX search page: https://shipcsx.com/pub_sx_trackingpublic_jct/sx.trackingpublic/UmlerSearch
It looks like they took twin bay bottom discharge hoppers and replaced the doors underneath with tubs as they were emptied using rotary dumpers. Less weight and maintenance.
I wonder if there is a way to make a comparison here? To me it would seem as though this configuration offer an increased capacity/tonnage ability. What is the light weight of these, versus a traditional two bay discharge car? And what is the same for loaded versions?
And I hate to burst your bubble but the car I saw was 1:1 scale not N nor HO and I am pretty sure Walthers does not stock it (Do they have anything in stock?) Please refer to the post immediately after yours (the one with the picture of car # NS 10153). That is exactly the kind of car that I saw. The weathering appears to be similar also.
Trinity Aluminator. See post #3: https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?2,4389998 If you want to model the car in N, replacement tubs made to fit the Atlas 90T hopper are available: https://www.shapeways.com/product/C95ZHMAJZ/n-scale-aluminator-tubs
No need to wonder. If you can identify a specific existing 2-bay car to compare it to, the above link should tell you what you want to know. It says NS10160 has a tare wt of 47k and a load limit of 239k. At 51 feet it is bigger than any 2-bay that I've ever seen.
I've actually seen some of these cars out in the wild. They are some NS rebuilds of older discharge chute type hoppers into bathtub gons. My guess is the design was less that successful or there would have been a lot more of them. Maybe someone that has a fairly current ORER could tell us more about the number of gons in that 101XX series. Probably wouldn't be too hard to kit bash something like this or better yet, 3D print those half round tubs to attach to the bottom of an existing Atlas, Kato or other manufacturers N scale hopper offerings.
