I recently did some work on my layout that required everything to come off. I used a railer to put everything back on. There is a night and day difference between railing a string of ten-year-old cars and the new Friendship cars. The old cars just roll down the railer and couple right up to the previous car. The Friendship cars all fail to couple when they impact the previous car. It usually requires lifting a closed coupler onto another closed coupler.
If you have to have something new, locate an old donor car for trucks. Otherwise, just don’t buy anything new until the trucks get fixed.
It isn’t a matter of there not being an industry-wide truck standard for Ogauge. Lionel trucks ARE the Ogauge standard and have been for 100 years. They have historically worked with everything and everything has worked with them. The new trucks and couplers simply aren’t designed and/or built well, are far inferior to their predecessors, and should be avoided.
