Some Of The Wildest Trains Carry Million-Pound Equipment By Converting Them Into Gigantic Train Cars

The world of shipping is a magical thing. The world is full of ships, aircraft, trucks, and trains working in concert to deliver the goods, regardless of whether they’re a simple letter or a ginormous power transformer. If you have a ridiculously heavy and large piece of equipment and you’re shipping it by rail, there’s a chance that it might end up on something called a Schnabel car. But this isn’t any normal railcar. The art of the Schnabel car is that it actually turns your cargo into a whole train car, where the cargo itself becomes a load-bearing structure complete with two dozen axles.

There are just under a few dozen Schnabel cars in the United States. Due to their rarity and their special use case, many railfans may never see a Schnabel car in action in years, if not decades, of chasing trains down the rails. For many railfans, catching a Schnabel on the rails in real life is like finding the holy grail.

Despite their rarity, Schanabel cars exist for a critical reason. According to the United States Energy Information Administration, this country is home to 12,538 power plants generating at least 1 megawatt of power. The American power grid is supported by over 500,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and another 5 million miles of distribution lines. That alone is mind-boggling, but there’s one more vital component to keeping the lights on and it’s the large-power transformer (LPT). These specially-constructed units, which can cost over $7 million a piece and weigh around 440 tons (970,030 pounds) or more, are used to step up or step down power along the line. If an LPT fails, it can cause an electrical service interruption and costly damage.

As Forbes reported in 2014, LPTs are made to order and are heavily customized, so there isn’t a supply of them just sitting in a warehouse waiting to be shipped. But when an LPT does need to make its way to an American locality, there’s really only one way to deliver it, and it’s by rail.

However, this presents a problem. As the United Pacific Railroad notes, standard flatcars are up to 89 feet long and can carry up to 202,000 pounds. For extra-heavy loads, there are also specialty flatcars and depressed-deck cars designed to carry up to 740,000 pounds of cargo. TTX Company, a railcar pooling provider, says these extra heavy-duty cars will often be used to support power generation, including: “Boilers, turbines (including wind energy hubs and nacelles), electrical transformers, pressure vessels, and shipments that frequently require special handling and train operations.”

But what if you have something that’s even heavier? Or what if you have something that’s so huge that it can’t fit on even a heavy-duty railcar? For those mammoth loads, you need an equally colossal, dedicated rail platform. That’s the Schnabel car, pictured above, and without it, American energy would be very different.

Nearly A Century Of Heavy Hauling

Finding history on the Schnabel car has been rather difficult, but reporting from Trains.com has helped. The Schnabel car appears to have been invented in the early 1930s in Germany. The word “Schnabel” comes from the German term “tragschnabelwagen,” which roughly translates to carrying-beak-wagon. Vintage tragschnabelwagens looked like two bird beaks connecting a large piece of equipment together and suspending it over a track.

The earliest image I could find of a tragschnabelwagen is the one above, which depicts a Schnabel wagon carrying a Karl-Gerät self-propelled mortar in 1945 during World War II. French forces also used Schnabel cars to carry their own heavy gear.

The earliest mention that I’ve found of a Schnabel car here in America is in 1958 from Westinghouse. That year, the company said that the Schnabel car was an important breakthrough as it allowed the company’s power transformers to grow large enough to handle 450,000 kVA. Back then, Westinghouse transformers weighed 250 tons and no other railcars were able to carry the gigantic beasts. That car was known as WECX 200, and it was built by Greenville Steel Car Company of Greenville, Pennsylvania in 1957. Railfans consider it to be the first Schnabel car in America.

How It Works

The concept of the Schnabel car back then was similar to how it is today. The railcar is actually two separate railcars with several axles. Attached to these railcars are two massive lifting arms. When these cars are empty, the two arms are bolted together, forming one giant railcar.

When it comes time to carry a load, the equipment is bolted to the lifting arms, and then the arms lift the equipment off the ground. Once the equipment is lashed up, the two Schnabel car ends and the equipment become one rigid railcar. In practice, it means that the piece of equipment being hauled is bearing a heavy structural load as if it were a railcar.

If, for whatever reason, the load cannot bear the weight of being a train car, there is an easy fix. An operator may insert a bridge into the lifting arms, pictured above, creating what’s essentially a super extra large depressed-deck car. However, there’s way more to a Schnabel car than that.

Since Schnabel cars carry hilariously huge and heavy loads, they’re highly specialized freight vehicles. The railcar can’t have what’s more or less a million pounds of weight centered on small patches on the rails, so Schnabel cars spread out the weight of the load across dozens of axles. The largest Schnabel car in the world, the WECX 801, built by Kasgro Railcar in Pennsylvania in 2012, has a total of 36 axles and weighs 880,967 pounds (399.6 tons) all on its own. That’s wild when you remember that these cars can then carry a single piece of equipment weighing in at a million pounds on its own. WECX 801 is so huge that it’s one of the largest railcars in the world.

One special feature of some Schnabel cars is that the arms actually sit on pivots and can use hydraulic rams. These allow the arms to move the load to the outside of a turn or help the train crew move the load to clear crossing gates, trees, signals, switches, or other obstacles that may be in the way. This is a bigger deal than you might think. A loaded Schnabel car may be as long as 300 feet or so, and that makes turns quite dramatic. If a load on a Schnabel car takes a turn on a line with two tracks, the overhang may be so huge that the load actually crosses over the entire second track during the turn.

WECX 801 is capable of shifting its load 40 inches laterally and 44 inches vertically. These movements happen shockingly slow, so slow that you might not even notice them happening.

Special Operations

If this sounds like a delicate and crazy operation, you’re not wrong. These cars also carry reactor containment vessels, generators, oil refinery towers, and anything else that’s way too huge and way too heavy to go onto a regular railcar.

BNSF Railway says that shipping something on a Schnabel car calls for a special operation. Schnabel cars are given their own special train consists.

These trains will have the pulling locomotive, the Schnabel car, and support and tool cars. They also commonly have a caboose for the train crews that need to monitor and run the train and the Schnabel car. That crew may also have mechanics and welders who can fix the train in the field if something goes wrong.

But that’s it. You won’t find a Schnabel car as a part of a regular freight train.

BNSF notes that the Schnabel cars it runs for clients permit a maximum height of 19’9″ and a maximum width of 13’1″. This substantial size means that the railroad has to plan anywhere from months to a year before a move can happen with a Schnabel car. During that time, the railroad will ensure that the load can actually fit under bridges, around curves, and through grade crossings without causing havoc. Routing is also cleared through the Railway Industrial Clearance Association.

When it’s finally go time for the move, the train will also go slowly. Some Schnabel car movements go as slow as 10 mph, while faster moves are still a leisurely 25 mph. Due to this slow speed, it can take a railroad a week or longer to deliver a load through a Schnabel train.

Other kinds of Schnabel cars include a one-piece lifting arm design that more or less “hugs” the load above the ground. There’s another one-piece design that has the appearance of a depressed-deck car that was scaled up in Photoshop. But these two other types are less common.

Chances are that most reading this piece may never see a Schnabel car. There are fewer than 100 Schnabel cars in the entire world right now, and their owners, typically private companies contracting railroads to haul the loads, use them only when needed. Keep in mind that a gigantic transformer moving at just 25 mph is going to slow down a railroad’s operation. Many other companies also get by just fine by hauling their loads on specialized semi-tractors or in much faster aircraft when such is possible.

Still, Schnabel cars fall into a sort of niche, but a very important one. They are just one major cog in the wheel of American power generation and heavy logistics. But, even if you ignore that, these railcars are also just seriously cool. If you’re a railfan or even just tangentially interested in trains, keep your eyes peeled. Maybe one day a Schnabel will roll slowly through your town.