Subject:
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Re: Longest train, eh? (was: Two Easy Questions about Rolling Stock)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.trains
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Date:
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Fri, 1 Feb 2002 11:27:52 GMT
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Viewed:
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431 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.fun, Tony Hafner writes:
> In lugnet.off-topic.fun, Reinhard "Ben" Beneke writes:
> > http://www-public.tu-bs.de:8080/~rbeneke/lego/fgltc/fgltc5.html
>
> Back onto the topic of trains, one of the images here shows a bunch of beer
> cars being pulled along a track. The accompanying text states:
>
> "Later a second world record was reached, when the train was
> prolonged by 18 further yellow tipper waggons. This was
> definitely the longest pulled Lego®-train ever, maybe even
> the longest Lego® train ever put on the track!"
Ok, I will change that text: it is obviously wrong - my mistake.
But in real life speed records with trains have to be made in both directions
and for long Lego train records, I am of the opinion that a record should only
count if the long train is doing a complete loop. Just bringing it to movement
on a straight is another kind of record...
For the moment I have changed the text in a way, that no more misunderstandings
are possible. Thanks alot for your hint. I followed most of the PNLTC
discussions in august 2000, but it seems I have completely missed the longest
train in the report then.
Our 127 waggons have had a length of 127x(16+3)studs x 8mm/stud= 19,30 m =
63,33 feet
If you have been able to do your loop with 50% of 150 feet, you would have that
record for sure too....
> It *might* be the longest ever, but "definitely" is a strong word. At the
> Seattle Center House in August 2000 (a couple of months before this), PNLTC
> was running a train that was at least 150 feet long. I don't have a car
> count, but close to half of the train was made up of 16-long hoppers. It
> never made it all the way around the track without decoupling, but we did
> get a run or two where it went at least its own length.
On a straight line we would have been able to put much more waggons behind, but
at the 180° turning points the friction of the wheel sets increase the force on
the magnet coulings so much, that they tend to tear off easily for any train
being longer than 100 waggons.
> I doubt there were very many stock Lego cars on it, though, and there may not • have been any.
> We didn't register this train officially (with Guinness) for "longest train"
> because we wanted to do that with a train that could consistently make it
> all the way around the outer loop. In the end, we registered a train with
> well under half the total cars.
Could you bring out, exactely how many cars / how much lenght that has been: I
wasn't able to find that right now mentioned in any of the august 2000
postings. And second question: have you used just engines at the front of the
train?
> Notes to those who've never done a truly huge train:
> * As Ben mentioned, multiple steady hands on multiple regulators is key.
> Our track wasn't really designed very well for the purpose of a train this
> size, and our regulators weren't evenly spaced. As a result, the train
> would surge in various places and decouple.
We fought against the same problems...
> * If you want to use stock magnetic couplers, that is your limiting factor.
> And just tossing in more locomotives in various places doesn't fully fix
> this problem, because if the pushing/pulling power to the cars isn't
> distributed properly then the couplers "buckle" on turns.
We started our train just to see how many waggons could be pulled. I would not
have forseen any trouble for a much longer train with more engines spread
between the waggon. Maybe one has to use just lots of engines: every 10 waggons
an extra engine (+ lots of transformers) might help to fix the problem and
make a "endless" train possible?
But - as said - we never tested that...
> Tony Hafner
> www.hafhead.com
> www.pnltc.org
Thanks Tony for your informations!
Kind Regards,
Ben
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