Capacity of Tankcars

[allainp]

I am a bit at lost about how the product quantity (capacity) is calculated for the tankcars. According to Wiki (and I kind of remember having also seen that in the 2006 manual), the capacity of tankcar (liquid) is given in "liters", independently of the product. But...



- Your 10000 gal tankcars are showing a capacity of 80500 units (should'nt it be 37854 ?)

- Your 20800 gal tankcars are showing a capacity of 91700 units (should'nt it be 78736 ?)

- Your 23000 gal tankcars are showing a capacity of 72000 units, less than the previous one (should'nt it be 87064 ?)

- Your LPG tankcars are showing a capacity of 190000, which is roughly 50192 U.S. gal. According to UTLX, their biggest LPG tankcar is 33800 gal, so if it is the same type, shouldn't the capacity be 127947 liters ?

- Your modern TankTrain are showing a capacity of 87300. Should'nt they be somewhat equivalent to the previous one ?



I also have this discrepency with the 17600 gal Corn Syrup tankcars from Dave Snow, which are showing a capacity of 40000 units instead of 66623 liters ?



I am simply trying to understand before correcting some numbers. If I am misunderstanding, please tell me.



Thanks in advance.

 

[Yoda967]

I was just thinking about this with regard to several different types of cars. Different commodities have different weights by volume, of course, and it's easy enough to look up the weights of bulk commodities by the pound/cubic foot and gram/cubic centimeter. My first pass at it was for some covered hoppers on my line: Plastic pellets, for example, are 45 pounds/cubic foot, rock salt is 68 pounds/cubic foot, and sand is about 100 pounds/cubic foot...so you can see that there would be different quantities of each that could be loaded into a given car, and that a car that's perfectly full with plastic pellets would be less than half full by volume if carrying the same weight of sand.

I haven't opened up any commodities to examine the config yet, but I assume there's a value in there that pertains to weight by volume.

To anyone wondering why it even came up, I can't speak for the OP, but for me, I started looking into it because I'm modeling a shortline that has a weight limit of 263,000 lbs, and the max weight for most modern cars is 286,000 pounds. The line generally operates a single GP9, and with a ruling grade of 1.3%, I wondered how many loaded cars I could pull up the hill from the interchange, and that led me down the "how much does a freight car weigh" rabbit hole.

None of this is criticism of the extremely fine work that many content creators produce, just a desire to dig a little deeper and learn a little more.

 

[Pendolino]

The "mass" tag in the config of a product represents:
- the weight in kilograms of 1 liter of product for bulk loads, such as coal, oil, plastic pellests or sand)
- the weight of an item, for other loads coming as individual items, such as logs, ISO containers, cars, pipes.

If these values are properly set, a car will load a small volume of a heavy product (e.g. ballast) and a considerably larger volume of a lighter product (chicken feathers). Unfortunately, some authors don't care about the proper setting of this little tag, so we have automobiles weighing more than tanks, or tanks lighter than motorbikes . On the other hand, the built-in boxcars that carry 7 "General Goods" (~ 10 tons) are not a good example of proper load setting .

 

[Saieditor]

I did a white search on the DLS last night and downloaded 4 x 80 footer tankers.
I could not edit the quantity within but they were heavy enough to drag around with a triclops and a tier 4 slug (both from the DLS last night) on kickstarter county. I didn't mind.

 

[simulatortrain]

I always calculate how many units of the desired product it takes to reach the car's capacity by weight.

 

[norfolksouthern37]

I am a bit at lost about how the product quantity (capacity) is calculated for the tankcars. According to Wiki (and I kind of remember having also seen that in the 2006 manual), the capacity of tankcar (liquid) is given in "liters", independently of the product.

This is true, and checking the config of any of these cars will reveal that the queue size is in fact set to the correct volume in liters. What you are seeing is the weight capacity of whatever product is selected to load.

 

[RPearson]

You're right Norfolk. For bulk products the total mass of the railcar that you get from the view details dialog is the mass of the railcar without any product loaded plus the loaded volume of the car times the mass density of the product. Units are mass in kg, volume in liters and density in kg/ltr. The necessary values are taken from the railcar mass tag, queue capacity used and product mass tag.

I don't get into this too much anymore. But early on we realized the system Auran set up didn't consider weight limits for the railcars like real railroads have to content with. We got railcars that were overloaded when the product density was heavy enough. A few custom tags were proposed by content creators that were used to set the max weight limits. This worked pretty well if the tags were used in the railcar configs along with the custom scripts needed to make it all work.

Did N3V ever fix the omission in max weight limit or are we still using the workaround from a decade ago?

Bob Pearson

 

[norfolksouthern37]

still using the workaround or calculating the queue items as simulatortrain says above.

 

[allainp]

Thank you all for the answers.

 

[jonwray]

Back in 2008 I found the lack of weight limit entertaining. Somehow I ended up filling the TRS2006 BNSF coke hoppers with (probably) I-Traeger beams (where one unit equals one flatcar worth of beams), and heading downhill at 500 MPH with a 48 Class on front. Fun times. I remember wanting to build a maglev track across the route just so I could race the two trains. The only way that 48 got up to 500+ MPH was due to the millions of tons of red and blue "texture weirdness" (yes that's what I called it... I didn't take Trainz seriously back then) filling the coke hoppers. All thanks to the lack of weight limit.

 

[Saieditor]

Back in 2008 I found the lack of weight limit entertaining. Somehow I ended up filling the TRS2006 BNSF coke hoppers with (probably) I-Traeger beams (where one unit equals one flatcar worth of beams), and heading downhill at 500 MPH with a 48 Class on front. Fun times. I remember wanting to build a maglev track across the route just so I could race the two trains. The only way that 48 got up to 500+ MPH was due to the millions of tons of red and blue "texture weirdness" (yes that's what I called it... I didn't take Trainz seriously back then) filling the coke hoppers. All thanks to the lack of weight limit.

Were those the days when the Trainz Ski-jump would send you flying over miles of landscape at terrifying speeds?

 

[jonwray]

Were those the days when the Trainz Ski-jump would send you flying over miles of landscape at terrifying speeds?

I didn't actually use a ski jump. I just turned the throttle up to 100 percent and drive downhill on the Marias Pass Approach.