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Wooden Flat Cars
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Wooden Flat Cars
As the earliest trains have long held my interest, I've joined the NPRHA and started researching Northern Pacific's earliest history.  The wooden rolling stock of the 1800's has become a favorite subject for study and modeling.

 
30' Flat Cars
The NPRHA Equipment Roster database goes back as far as 1908.  The smallest flat cars it lists are 30' long with a 24,000 lb capacity.  After reviewing photo sources I decided these cars would be among the most likely candidates for construction of the Stampede Pass trestles and switchbacks.  With the low weight capacity, I decided they are most likey only 7'6" wide and also figured they might have no deck overhang.  A flush deck is unusual but I saw flush-deck flatcars in photos of staging yards for line-building on the Great Northern.

 
MTH Arch Bar Trucks
For the 3-railer there are several good options available for trucks as replacements or kit additions, but little for the arch-bar trucks of the early days.  The first 3 flat cars have MTH arch bar freight trucks under them.  These are nice, inexpensive trucks that work well with other 3-rail rolling stock as they have the traditional 3-rail coupler.  Unlike Atlas 3-rail trucks, you can't replace the coupler, and removal would be via hacksaw.  At 5'6" axle-to-axle, these trucks are a bit oversized for these 24,000 lb cars and would be better suited to 40,000 lb to 50,000 lb capacity. 
 
SMR Arch Bar Trucks
The next 3 flat cars have SMR arch bar freight trucks under them.  At 4'8" axle spacing and with lighter spring arches, these are much better suited to a car with 24,000 lb to 30,000 lb capacity.  These are beautiful, expensive trucks with much better and more accurate detail.  They work fairly well with 3-rail wheels: SMR uses wheels from NWSL, which has the best wheels I've found, especially for 3-rail.  The only difficulties I've found are that, since I have to assemble the trucks myself, they are subject to my model-building inaccuracies and take more fooling-around to get them rolling smooth; and they are fixed castings with no independently sprung sides, so they are slightly more likely to jump a poorly thrown switch or climb out of a tight S-curve.   You can see the link-and-pin coupler holding these 2 cars; here again, much more accurate, they look great, run well, but are a bit more of a trick to use.  They work fine for me since I do very little switching in & out of consists. 
 
SMR Link-and-Pin Couplers
You can see the link-and-pin coupler holding these 2 cars; here again, much more accurate, they look great, run well, but are a bit more of a trick to use.  They work fine for me since I do very little switching in & out of consists. 
 
Coupler Adapter Pin
For adapting the traditional 3-rail coupler I have a paper clip bent into a shape where the lin-and-pin end drops in as the pin instead of using any link; this helps to keep the spacing fairly close.  The 3-rail end has a series of curved-zig-zag bends to fill the coupler's void, then a long shank underneath the MTH coupler's shank, and finally a sideways bend for anti-roll stability.  It's held onto the MTH coupler with a black rubber band.  Uncoupling is done by lifting the MTH truck until its attached adapter pin comes out of the vertical pin hole on the link-and-pin coupler.