2020 : British Columbia Electric Transformer on Flatcar

May 20, 2020 – CTTA announced another unique railroad car project. MTH is manufacturing a British Columbia Electric depressed center flat car with transformer load in their RailKing line. This very limited production “O” gauge car comes in two road numbers in 3 rail.

The Canadian Toy Train Association member cost is:

$ 85.00 CDN per car including shipping within the lower mainland and Vancouver Island. With the current US Dollar exchange rate versus the Canadian dollar, this is a real deal for our Canadian members.

$65.00 USD plus $12 USD shipping for members in the United States. This is a great deal for you car will be shipped directly from MTH.

This is the ninth MTH car in our Canadian freight car series and is a limited one-time run. Actual production model O gauge car shown.

About this model:

For transporting large or heavy items over land, nothing beats a railroad flat car. No wonder that manufacturers use flat cars to ship products or sub-assemblies ranging from transformers to airliner fuselages to heavy construction and mining equipment.

But how big is too big? That is determined by a railroad’s loading gauge, which defines the maximum height and width of rolling stock and engines. Great Britain, the birthplace of railroading, has one of the smallest loading gauges because so much of its network has bridges and tunnels built in the mid-1800s, when trains were smaller. In the US, older, more urban eastern roads tend to have smaller loading gauges than western roads that traverse wide-open spaces. That’s why, for example, 1950s-era vista-dome passenger cars were common on western railroads but rare in the east.

Over the years, flatcar designers have devised various means of squeezing the most inside a loading gauge, with one of the most popular being the depressed center flat car. Dropping the car floor down, until it almost touches the rails between the car’s trucks, allows room for larger, heavier loads like the electrical transformer depicted on our model.