Road Railer – Coupler mate

thingiverse

While I would dispute that the container was invented in the US, there is one kind of intermodal transportation that clearly originated there – the Road Railer! These are special designed road trailers, who can be coupled directly into a train, just by adding special bogies. For more info see here: http://espee.railfan.net/swift.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozqY3Ze4sAU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXvzyM0NFtA (the last one is just a train of five locos and 81 Road Railers – very impressive). There were some experiments with this or similar systems in Europe, incl. UK, but it didn’t find a place in the market. But it seems, that Road Railer made their way to India: https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/chennai/2018/sep/26/southern-railway-launches-indias-first-roadrailer-train-1877217.html https://rdso.indianrailways.gov.in/uploads/files/HANDBOOK%20ON%20ROADRAILER%20FINAL%20%281%29.pdf When it comes to model railroad in n-scale, namely to the important US-version, there isn’t much offered. The only manufacturer, who (as to my knowledge) made n-scale models of Road Railers was Deluxe Innovation in the late 90’s. You may find sometimes second-hand Road Railers at ebay or similar marketplaces, but to use them in a train you would need a couple mate and these are very rare. To fill at least this gap, I designed a couple mate to use in place of the original one (I was lucky ones to buy a complete Road-Railer-set). The bogie was taken from a mrgimmeone-design: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5452926/files Ricky Buyatte has a lot of good designs in n-scale, I strongly recommend a look to: https://www.thingiverse.com/mrgimmeone/designs For wheels I use Altlas 33” metal wheels (#22020) and for coupler Bachmann EZmate (#78502): https://shop.atlasrr.com/p-1201-n-33-metal-wheels-blackened.aspx https://shop.bachmanntrains.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=2767 Maybe someone is creating a whole Road-Railer model, but meanwhile I hope this couple mate will be of use.