Passenger car running qualities

[dibber25]

I've hesitated before 'going public' with this, but am I alone in finding that the operation of some North American passenger cars is to put it mildly, not great. I realise that these models are intended for US layouts with very easy curves and that an 18ft by 9ft 'oval' is pretty small by those standards. I have have three coaching sets:

A six-car Athearn Bombardier double-deck set. These are the biggest and heaviest and they provide no problems at all - they run beautifully.

A four-car ONR set comprising two Rapido baggage cars and two Walthers streamline passenger cars.

A four car (shortly to become five) Walthers VIA stainless steel set.

Both the latter have proved troublesome with excessive uncoupling and derailment on the curves. I've had some success curing the ONR set by modifying the Rapido cars as shown in their instructions to cope with 2ft radius curves (my curves are mostly not much under 3ft) and by fitting long-shank EZmate couplers to set the cars further apart.

The VIA set remains troublesome, however, despite having had the long-shank couplers fitted. I'm now checking and, where helpful, packing the track to produce some slight super-elevation on the curves but I'm limited on how much I can do without potentially upsetting the running of the double-deckers. Because they run OK, I'm assuming my track laying can't be too bad.

At the moment it looks like more work on the couplers to allow greater freedom of movement plus some work to ensure adequate bogie movement both pivot and vertical play. What about additional weighting in the Walthers cars (the Athearn cars are really heavy). Any thoughts, or more importantly successful experience, anyone?

CHRIS LEIGH

[shortliner]

I suspect that adding weight may help to cure the problem - I only run freight so haven't had the problem, I'm afraid. Of course, if your curves are tight they may be trying to "string-line", and extra weight may help to solve that

[Neil Rogers]

with the walthers cars you basically need to strip right down and rebuild.

 

faults with mine are:-

 

1-corridor connection - replaced with American limited

 

2-bogies crabbing + check back to backs of axles

 

3-lighting pickups - on mine these are the worst offenders, the screw head of truck rests on little metal pads on underside of car. on tight radius they always catch and derail car. answer-remove pickups from car.

 

4-coupler boxes sometimes are a bit tight.

 

HTH

 

Neil