Passenger weight limits

Hi, just wondering if anyone has looked at the safe carrying capacity of passenger riding cars. We have recently experienced some failures of bogies and bearings and some derailments on a ground level 7-1/4" gauge club track caused we believe by excessive loading weight of passengers. We would be interested in any research done on the carrying capacity of riding cars so we can potentially introduce some weight limits. Thanks.

Good question! Remember when we used to laugh at chubby Americans? Now 67% of UK males, 60% of women and 20% children are obese or overweight. I guess most rolling stock was designed back when people were slimmer...

Wish I still had my slim boyish figure!

Dave

All so how does the larger body affect the centre of gravity of riding cars? Especially when the individual decides to shift his/her weight to take selfie on a radius.

Guy

That's one of the problems, Guy, that has caused us to ban cameras and phones while riding our trains. The other problem is people 'leaning into' the curve thinking they are helping, when in reality all it does is unload the outer wheels causing them to ride up the rail and derail the riding car.

Our riding cars are quite substantial, weighing around 100kg, so no problem when loaded with 6-8 kids but get 2 adults weighing 100+ kg each and it becomes an issue.

We want to impose a weight limit but rather than pick some arbitrary number we were hoping for a bit of science to guide us.

I suppose with knowledge of the weight of the cars, radius of curves and the speeds that the train travels at you could work out a typical mass and the height above the track that would unload the outer wheels. That would allow you to come up with something that would be hard to argue with. Using the total weight and the centre of mass you could get a useable value at which the vector sum of centripetal force and weight is pointing at the inner rail, that would be the absolute limit at which the car will not topple outwards. Pick some percentage of this for a safety margin.

Martin C

There's no problem if the 2 metre spacing rules are observed.