Exit car on some coaster trains

Hey, I've been trying to find information about the exit cars found on some coasters. It's the little car with 2 wheels and usually no chassis found at the end of the train. Does anyone know where I can find some info on this?

It's referred to as the zero-car in most situations. There are endless threads about Alpengeists.

B&M's tend to have them in the front, sometimes with seats attached (most inverts, floorlesses).

Arrows tend to have them in the back.

They're built as a control point on the train. The connection between the zero-car and adjacent car restricts pitch. In a trailered car situation, if these didn't exist, the cars wouldn't remain parallel to the track (or, if they did, there would be stress in unwanted places).

The front car of Intamin hypers have front and back wheel assemblies to compensate for this. The lead axle of Millennium Flyers serve this purpose... It's all over the place.

If you look at Arrow/Vekoma trains - the wheels of each car (apart from the front car) are at the rear of the car, therefore - if the zero car wasn't there then there would be nothing to support the rear of the rear car.

This screenshot from No Limits demonstrates what I mean.

http://www.2ndlea.co.uk/boom_jpg.JPG

Rick.

It's hard to notice on B&M inverts, but if you look closely when the train is going through a loop, the first and second row are at the same angle, which basically shows how the front row is really a zero car.

http://rcdb.com/ig1.htm?picture=5

On a typical Schwarzkopf train the front car carries four sets of wheels and the rest of the cars trailer off of it. After the accident on the Mindbender at Galaxyland, (where the train became separated and fishtailed into other structure) the park replaced the trailer cars on each train with nothing but front cars attached together. Now all cars in the train have four wheels on the track and that type of accident will never happen again.

I came into this thread thinking you wanted to know which cars to sit in in order to be closer to the exit of a perticular ride. :)