Originally released in 2018, Marklin has produced a number of these cars in various paint schemes and with a variety of containers. The cars are made mostly of metal with some plastic parts and the containers are plastic. These cars are not as detailed as similar container cars from other manufacturers, but come fully assembled and ready to use on your layout. I think they strike a good balance between detail and functionality as I am constantly having to reattach small detail parts from my container cars from other manufacturers. These cars do have one flaw that can be easily corrected. The plastic overlapping walkway parts between the halves of the cars have a tendency to fall off when handling the cars. I have added a drop of clear silicon glue to the underneath side of the upper half of these walkways to glue them to the metal body. As long as you leave this part at a slight upwards angle, it will not detract from the function of the cars and these parts won't go missing.

These cars use the same mounting system as the Marklin/Trix Sgns and Sgnss cars, so you can exchange containers between them. Also, a number of other manufacturers containers can be used with these such as AWM, Roco, & Walthers. For the AWM and Roco containers, you will have to add posts, but the Walthers containers from current production runs will work without modification. It should also be noted that the cars are not identical. In addition to several paint schemes, the brake wheel detail varies by road name.

I had originally only purchased a couple of these cars, but now have more than ten. They run well and take up less space on the layout than my longer cars that hold 45' or multiple 20'/24' containers. Thus, you can run what appears to be a longer train that is really shorter and a better fit for smaller layouts. They have no problems negotiating R1 curves.

I can honestly highly recommend these cars and here is a short video that I made showing a few of them:

Edited by user 09 May 2020 22:35:56(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I received an email from Rocky-Rail. They are the distributor for Igra and for Portuguese company PT Trains.
The email mentions that as of next week, a new accessory from PT Trains will be available, which will allow for the use of containers with sockets on Maerklin and other container cars that also have sockets. These adapters (with or without base) are inserted into the socket of the container car and then fit into the socket of the container underside.



I am definitely looking forward to this. It is going to make my container trains much more interesting.
Note: For some containers, only the mounts used for that load are required. Not all containers can be used if all pins are in place on the car surface.

Regards

Mike C

I also have a bunch of these wagons from Märklin and Trix.

As mentioned you can opt to use containers from other Mä-Trix wagons.

The very close spacing between the two halves and the Jacob-boogie with the metal frame makes for good running and considerably shorter length compared to using two regular 40-foot container wagons. The running is also better with boogies compared to the two single axles on a regular 40-foot wagon and even more so compared with the longer 45-foot 2-axles.

This type of wagon is great for whole trains or combined with Sgnss or L-wagons or other modern types of container wagons.

One suggestion to fit other brands of containers is either to drill holes and add a short metal pin in the underside of the container or simply use two small balls of javascript:__doPostBack('forum$ctl03$PostReply','')blue-tac to secure the container to a wagon.