Trailer / Container Chassis Repair Shop

Greetings All,

In my recent Empire City urban renewal project blog post one of the buildings being moved out of Empire City was Nobody's Auto Repair which is an old Life-Like "Sparkle Car Wash" kit. I believe these are now in the Atlas products line.

Looking to repurpose and fit the repair shop into a place on the layout I thought a Trailer / Container Chassis Repair Shop would work well in this corner of Terminal Yard near my TOFC track.

The common practice at many railroad intermodal yards is to lift trailers and containers from railcars and put the trailer on the ground and the container onto a chassis specially designed to transport them over the road. Many of these chassis can be adjusted to carry containers that are anywhere from 40' to 48'.

This can lead a container chassis to undergo a beating during the loading procedure. The most common issues I observed while working for CSX Intermodal were with the tires and landing legs. In winter the air brakes would freeze and dragging a chassis around the yard trying to get the brakes to release would cause flat spots in the tires. Railyards being what they are flat tires were not uncommon.

Swinging a loaded container onto the chassis front end to set it into the chassis pins would at times cause the landing legs to take the brunt of the weight and sometimes buckle. This practice saved some time and an experienced crane operator could do this in their sleep. You can see the container pins in the photo.

Both of the above were in violation of the rules and procedures but were not an uncommon occurrence. These shortcuts and remedies however did not always work out. Solution: Get a new chassis and take the damaged one to what we called the roadability shop.

Trailers sometimes didn't fare so well either with a rookie crane operator. The trailer should land on the rear tires first not the landing legs which can leave one scratching their head. It's called the landing legs!😉

Here's a close up of the trailer / container chassis repair shop with extra chassis, wheels, parts etc. This is a good place for an extra chassis or trailer to add some additional visual interest to TOFC and COFC operations. 

Many of these chassis management and repair locations are operated by third party vendors like Consolidated Chassis Management  and Trac Intermodal. 

Chassis pools and the containers that go with them were a challenge for me when I started working for CSX. Container X had to go on a SERP Chassis and Container Y an SATL Chassis. Here's a look at various chassis stenciling courtesy of CCM. Finding the right chassis could be quite challenging at times. The easiest containers to deal with were from JB Hunt. They could only go on a JB Hunt chassis which was bright orange and could be stacked only with another JB Hunt container in a train.

Here's a recent "How to model intermodal trains and yards" video from DJ's Trains. DJ is a CSX engineer and N scale modeler.

Thanks for reading!!

See ya soon!!