Hi everyone, I'm coming back from my dark ages and came across a problem with several builds that has bothered me.
I bought the BMR 50' PCF boxcar instructions a while ago, and recently noticed something: it's too tall. A standard AAR Plate C railcar is 15'6", which, using the L-gauge scale of 1 stud = 0.8 ft, equals 12.4 studs tall, but the BMR set is 14 studs tall! I've briefly looked around and it looks like several other models have a similar height issue -- BMR's classic 40' PS-1 boxcar should be 12 studs tall but is actually 13.2, their 60' hi-cube boxcar should be 13.6 but is actually 14.3, etc.
A big part of the problem seems to be wheels -- standard North American railcar wheels are 28-33 inches in diameter, which is roughly 2 studs wide, while we're stuck with 3 studs wide. Even for perfectly-sized railcars, this will present an issue with height consistency. (I'm not really worried about clearance, but I want to make lots of my own builds and I want them to match up with others's if/when I display at conventions)
So, do we have any sort of standardization for railcar height, especially considering the wheel size issue? And what do you all do? Do you just build the railcar itself to scale, and deal with slightly too-large wheels? Do you try to recess them slightly? Do you build the whole thing slightly out-of-scale in height?
