Aristo Heavyweight Passenger Cars & Kadee 907 Body Mounts
Body mounting Kadees to the Heavyweights is not a new topic as there have been different methods presented in the past that used both Kadee 830s (906 newer replacement) and Kadee 789s (907 newer replacement).
Aristo’s heavyweight passenger cars are factory equipped with truck mounted Aristo knuckle couplers. I did away with these and body mounted Kadee 907 centerset couplers.
An example Aristo-Craft Dining car fitted with body mounted Kadee 907 couplers is shown below.
I strive for train operation down to 8 foot diameter track for access to a rail yard and for assured operation on 10 foot diameter track areas on the main layout.
The 8 foot diameter will establish how close cars and locos can be without touching or binding, thus, determining where body mount couplers are to be located. The trade-off is: the tighter the curve track, the farther apart coupled cars will be noticeable on straight track.
As illustrated above, it can be seen how close the car & loco diaphragms are when coupled on the 8 foot diameter track. This is the worst case proximity I used to establish where the body mount couplers are to be located on cars.
The ends of these cars can differ and affect what is done for body mounting coupler
The detail that characterizes car ends can be described as follows:
(1) Plain (applicable to RPO, Baggage car)
(2) Vestibule (applicable to Combine, Coach, Pullman, and one end of the Observation car)
(3) Platform (applicable to the other end [rear] of the Observation car)
In this regard, the observation car’s rear platform has an intrinsic downward warp that had to be addressed.
For full information, see recently updated vignette (article) hosted for me by Greg E. on his Web site, title:
Aristo Heavyweight Passenger Car & Body Mount Kadee 907s
-Ted
