Exclusive Accurascale FCA 'binliner' revealed


03 October 2024
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Following the cutdown HYA wagons, Accurascale wanted to add something new to the mix in the form of the FCA bulk container traffic family. 

Never produced in OO before, the containers and flats are fully tooled, with the first samples having arrived for inspection before moving onto the decoration phase. You'll be able to see these Engineering Prototypes first-hand at the Great Electric Train Show in October.

Anticipated to arrive in stock in Q4, 2025 and available to pre-order now, the FCA packs each feature two wagon flats and no less than six containers per pack. Priced at £129.99 per twin pack, Accurascale is operating its usual 10% off when you buy two packs or more, along with a new offer of 15% off when you buy 5 or more packs directly from its website.

About the prototype

Glaring omissions from the range of wagons acquired by the English Welsh & Scottish Railway (EWS) on its takeover of the BR freight companies in 1996 were general-purpose container flats. Freightliner had taken the vast majority of the fleet when it was spun off from BR that same year, leaving only a rump of ageing vehicles mostly used for containerised ‘binliner’ household waste traffic, as well as Railfreight Distribution’s newer but more specialised FIA ‘Multifret’ fleet for Channel Tunnel intermodal traffic.

The result was an order for 400 flats semi-permanently coupled as ‘twins’ that were constructed by Thrall Europa at the former Carriage & Wagon Works at York Holgate between April 2000 and January 2001 and numbered 610001-610400. Primarily aimed at bulk traffic, the 92.7-tonne GLW 60ft platforms were part of a £200 million five-year investment for just over 2,400 vehicles by Ed Burkhardt’s company in 1997 that also included two other container-carrying types. These were both more specialised towards maritime or Channel Tunnel use, the 100 FAA ‘well’ style wagons and 150 FKA low platform ‘Megafret’ derivatives.

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Like many of the wagons constructed by Thrall, the FCAs were shod with the NACO ‘Swing Motion’ bogie. While this saved money, it limited the fleet to 60mph and forced a deck height of 1,023mm rather than the 980mm used for Freightliner’s Arbel Fauvet-built FSAs and FTAs. While this was acceptable for their bread and butter bulk flows, their use on maritime container trains, which were seeing an increasing number of 9’6” ‘high cube’ boxes, was restricted to major routes, or carrying standard height boxes only when mixed in with FAA and/or FKA.

In April 2000, the first two FCA pairs, Nos. 610001/2 and 610003/4 moved to Derby for approval and type testing. Their first deployment was to the London area, when over 120 vehicles were allocated to the Brentford to Calvert and Cricklewood to Forders ‘binliners’, while a further 30 examples were reported working out of Thrislington carrying lime to Margam in South Wales in the distinctive low-height Rail Freight Services containers.

The FCA would be associated with a range of other interesting duties over the next few years. They replaced two-axle FPAs on containerised coal traffic, were mixed in with wagonload vehicles in ‘Enterprise’ trains, and were partnered with brand new curtain-sided steel coil containers working out of South Wales. From the mid-2000s they turned heads on the East Coast Main Line when loaded with bright orange Rugby Cement 30ft ‘ISOVeyor’ flyash tanktainers and notably took over from KFAs to carry 20ft ammunition containers and other military supplies and equipment from a range of depots across the country. They have also been spotted carrying scrap carrying containers on the rear of the Outokumpu stainless steel trains between Tinsley and Immingham, while between 2011-6, they were used on various flows from Fiddlers Ferry and Drax carrying gypsum containers.

From 2010, new owner DB Schenker began a programme of uprating the brake equipment for 75mph running, recoding the modified wagons as FYA. Two years later, the operator addressed the other major compromise in the original design, replacing the 915mm diameter wheels with 826mm versions to reduce the overall deck height to accommodate ‘high cube’ containers within the standard Network Rail W10 loading gauge. The first recoded FXA to be converted, Nos. 610023/4, was also outshopped in DB traffic red, the only full repaint so far of these wagons. For others, the removal of the EWS branding and often replacement with a DB sticker is the norm. Finally, July 2015 saw the debut of the first FQA, a three-unit 180-ft long variant that used a converted ‘outer’ wagon with its buffers and drawgear replaced with a receptacle for a bar coupler.

One other interesting use for two pairs of former FCA ‘twins’ is partnering Network Rail Kirow ‘multi-tasker’ 1200UK crane No. 99 70 9319 013-7. These follow on from the 18 single-unit KFA variants of the FCA that have become the standard support wagons for the Kirow fleet operating with Balfour Beatty, Colas Rail, SB Rail and Volker Rail (ex-Grant Rail).

Bringing the story up to date, as well as a much greater use on intermodal traffic, more recently, examples have been fitted with ‘Super Tench’ mesh-sided modules recovered from scrapped FJAs, while others are equipped with three 20ft steel slab carriers or flat platforms for carrying concrete tunnel liner sections. They are still heavily associated with military trains and the ‘binliners’, although the Brentford and Northolt flows now run to Severnside, near Bristol, although they also ran to Scunthorpe in the mid-2010s. The FCAs are also used on the Knowsley-Wilton (Teesside) service carrying Merseyside’s domestic waste to the incinerators. While the Rugby fly ash working has fallen by the wayside, similar ISOVeyor tanktainers are used between Drax Power Station (via Milford Sidings) and Appleford carrying low-carbon ash to Forterra’s plant at Newbury as a major ingredient in Thermalite Aircrete blocks.

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