Have you ever wondered about this car/truck/wagon that comes with the EF210-102 loco in the S-26 Momotaro pack?

I thought I'd try to find out a bit more about it; this is what I've come up with:

In JR nomenclature it's a Shiki 810, a type of heavy-lift vehicle that's known in the west as a schnabel car. You can read about schnabel cars in general terms here , and here .

There's also a page about the Shiki 800/810 on Japanese Wikipedia, here , but machine-translation of this is not enormously successful. The picture links at the bottom are good though.

Here a couple of videos that I found:

[video=youtube]https://youtu.be/74gG83mSsIQ[/video]

[video=youtube]https://youtu.be/sjm5wAAPYBs[/video]

... and there are a whole bunch more of them in this playlist.

Many of these show Shikis being used to move transformers very similar to the Tomy one, but other loads are possible. It would be interesting to make one or two alternative loads to insert between the two ends, which incidentally clip together in authentic fashion to make an 'unloaded' Shiki:

One thing's for sure, you only need one of these and a caboose/brake/guard's van or two per train. A rake of them is just plain silly!