With the little rail truck now substantially complete and running it is time to turn my attention to other pieces of the railroad. The truck has room for a driver and one small passenger but when we have company that is not nearly enough capacity. The truck needed to pull a vehicle that could carry more passengers.
We had previously built an ore car which seated four passengers but this was long before we had our MultiCam CNC plasma cutter. Although very functional, it looked very boxy and plain compared to the truck. It was time to rethink the whole deal.
I decided to do a total redesign. I removed the wheel sets from the ore car, took careful measurements and then drew up a whole new concept. I decided two passengers was big enough and they needed to face forward. An air tank was also necessary as the truck will soon sport a whistle which will operate on compressed air. And it needed to be completely different and act as a trailer to the little rail truck. After trying a number of ideas I settled on a tandem trailer. It would sport a swivel axle to avoid the problems I encountered with the double axle truck.