MTH ELECTRIC TRAINS

Unlike equipment that carried a variety of loads, like boxcars, flatcars, and gondolas, the "sawtooth" style coal hopper was designed in the late 1800s specifically for one purpose: transporting coal from mines to customers. Its capacity matched the volume of coal that a pair of typical freight trucks could carry - about 50 tons at the time the prototypes for our model were built. And its slope sheets - the angled floors at either end of the car - were set at precisely the minimum angle at which coal would flow easily from its bottom doors, about 42 degrees.

Over the years, car builders applied various tweaks to the basic hopper design to squeeze out a few more cubic feet of capacity. Our model represents one popular tweak applied from 1937 through World War II: the "fishbelly" configuration at the bottom of the sides that lowered the car floor between the trucks. The taller ends on our model, known as heap shields or peaked ends, were designed to increase capacity as well.

This superbly detailed model appears for the first time in S Gauge in 2019. While the tooling was created by the S Helper Service team, the original owners retired before making the first production run.