I found this in a Popular Mechanics article that I happened upon on the Internet.

If you search YouTube for stable rollers you can get to the video directly again.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a25581/science-behind-train-trac...

I found it very interesting indeed.  For me, "Goes to show that you don't know what you don't know!"

Nick

I received an email from a friend, Forrest Becht, this morning.  Forrest has done lots of rail photography over the years, and the email contained a half dozen images that he had captured during the time that he was the General Manager of the Louisiana and Delta Railroad.  Two of the photos caught my attention and, with Forrest's permission, I'm posting them here along with his captions for the pictures.

This is a rather unusual method of transporting rail traffic (see caption below photo):

on this car, caught this one in the yard waiting for the steel gang to clear up. Took this pic for anybody looking to do some heavy duty weathering. Unfortunately I don't have a pic of the top of the car and I could only get this one side. It looks like IRC put out a model of this car but none available on e-bay right now. The newest paint on it looked to be the FURX reporting marks and even they look well weathered. The car was new in 2-80

I have zero experience operating a model railroad much less the real thing. I am clueless ( just found out being a railfan has a name associated, " Foamer " ) and I need some sources for prototypical railroad operations. Would/could anyone direct me towards a book, video, a web site that I could delve into and try to educate myself? Many thanks in advance for any and all help.