Elvas Tower: D&RGW "Pipe Gon" 1145 - Elvas Tower

In the early 1950s there was a major natural gas development near Farmington, NM and large amounts of steel gas pipe was needed for this operation. The most practical way of shipping this bulky pipe was by the D&RGW, but they had very few suitable flat cars to accomplish this. They did however, possess a large number of 30' "high side" gondolas, so they removed end ends from over 100 of these cars and used them to haul pipe. The pipe was 40' long and extended five feet from both ends, which made it impossible to couple these cars to together, so "idler flats" were coupled between them. The idler flats were made by cutting the upper structure from stock and box cars and adding a length of rail along each side to compensate for the lack of rigidity that had been provided by the removed upper structures. My previously uploaded D&RGW flat 6745 is an example of these idler cars.

The model was made from official D&RGW plans from the Maxwell Collection, and most historical data is from "A Century + Ten of D&RGW Narrow Gauge Freight Cars, 1871 to 1981" by RE Sloan.

To install, make a new folder under your Trainset folder and copy the six files to this folder.

This model's initial testing, physics adjustments, and texture tweaking was done by Howard Saunders. Further testing was done by Herb Kelsey and Tom Werb, and final Beta testing was done by Tim Muir.

The screen shot is by Howard Saunders.

Enjoy

Original File Name = D_RGW_Gondola_1145.zip