Back in the mists of time someone’s granddad realised that if you make a standard sized box you can fill it full of anything from rocking horses to paper clips, put it on a truck or a train, and when you came against a barrier said truck or train couldn’t cross, like the Atlantic, you just hoisted said box on a ship in a few minutes. This would save time and money, and incidentally keep your valuable products from any light fingered toerags lurking about the dockside. The idea caught on and now containers and similar are one of the major ways to shift stuff about.
Which may or may not be interesting but on the face of it has little to do with the my fictional narrow gauge empire. However, the Körschtalbahn is going to have a lot of intermodal traffic: it reduces the problem of double handling, where you have to put a load onto a narrow gauge train, run it for a few kilometres and then move it all over again to put it on a normal train for its onward journey, and it uses standard (ie:cheap) equipment that is the same all over the world. And I think container trains look really cool. And it’s my railway. So there.
John P of the Little Trains blog and I have been discussing this occasionally,and John recently posted about one solution called a lowliner, which saved me several hours of research. John is working in 1:72 scale on 9mm gauge track, and feels that a well wagon as used by the RHB is probably easier for him, but in my chosen scale of 1:55 scale on 16,5mm track I think a lowliner is feasible. A train of these would look pretty good being hauled up the valley by a big electric locomotive so the Maschienenfabrik Ostfildern has been instructed to get moving with getting on with a new design…
Railway Misadventures 