Rapido HO – Canadian Piggyback Flatcars (TOFC) with & without Trailers
Looking to give your consists that distinctly Canadian intermodal flavor, with a piggyback flatcar shorter and more versatile than the big American TOFC cars? This collection brings together Rapido Trains' Canadian piggyback flatcars, offered in both Canadian National and Canadian Pacific colors. Both of Canada's major railways launched piggyback (TOFC – trailer-on-flatcar) service back in the 1950s, and as that traffic surged in the late 1960s, they ordered purpose-built cars able to carry both 26-foot trailers and longer ones, up to the then-new 45-foot standard.
Rapido recreates these cars from well-documented prototypes. Canadian National ordered 283 cars from Vancouver Iron and Engineering Works (VIEW), delivered starting in 1966 and rebuilt to a single-hitch configuration in 1976. Canadian Pacific ordered 305 cars from Marine Industries Limited (MIL) in 1972 (road numbers 505625-505930), which soldiered on through several rebuilding programs. Shorter than the 89-foot TOFC cars, these flatcars were more versatile and able to navigate tighter curves — they ran in long intermodal cuts, but also mixed into manifest freights, and not only in Canada: they were common in New York State, Maine, and Vermont, and sometimes spotted as far west as California. Finely detailed and ready to run, these cars bring your layout the realism Rapido is known for.
What this collection brings together:
- Canadian piggyback flatcars (TOFC), HO scale (1:87)
- Canadian National (built by VIEW) and Canadian Pacific (built by MIL) liveries
- Versions with trailer(s) and without
- Two hitch styles included (upright and collapsed), modeler-installable
- Rapido semi-scale metal knuckle couplers, factory-installed
- Shorter than 89' TOFC cars, able to navigate tighter curves
- Ready-to-run (RTR)
- Ideal for intermodal cuts and manifest freights of the 1960s through the 1990s
