Model Railroad Hobbyist | July 2015 | #65 PUBLISHER’S MUSINGS Joe Fugate editorial Heavier cars = Better performance? When I visited Mike Confalone’s Allagash operating session in 2013 to video the footage for Ops Live vol- umes 5 and 6, I was impressed with how well everything ran. In fact, I saw no derailments during the entire six-hour operating session. That’s quite a feat. In my interview with Mike after the operating session (available on TrainMasters TV, running time: 78 min), I learned that Mike deliberately overweights his cars by at least 2x the NMRA RP for car weight in HO (see: nmra.org/rp-201-car-weight). Mike says this extra weight changes the train dynamics on the model such that it feels much more like you’re moving tonnage, and cars simply stay on the track better. Mike talks about this extra weight and other such philosophies for getting more reliable layout performance in his Allgash Story eBook series (store.mrhmag.com/store/p46/Allagash_Sto- ry_vols_1-4_%28Download%29.html). I was so impressed with the performance on Mike’s Allagash that I’ve elected to overweight some of my cars and see what differ- ent it makes. In my case, I’m adding one ounce per inch of car length over the couplers. On a 40-foot car, it’s about six inches, so it gets six ounces. On 50-foot cars, they’re about 7.5 inches over MRHMAG.COM • TABLE OF CONTENTS • INDEX