AmFlyer posted:I have 24 of the AM heavyweight style passenger cars. Approximately 1 in 4 of them had slightly low couplers which caused uncoupling, and worse, derailments when backing through turnouts. Out of the box the bottom of the coupler lever was below the top of the point rails and would catch on them. All the bad ones were on the 4 wheel trucks, not the 6 wheel trucks. I then changed all the 4 wheel trucks to 6 wheel trucks and carefully reassembled them. No more derailments or spurious uncoupling. A lot of work but they also look better.
There is another key difference between the Flyonel and AM wheel sets. 100% of the Flyonel freight and passenger wheel sets are manufactured with the gauge too narrow by about 0.1". This makes them very forgiving of less than perfect trackwork. All the AM (and SHS/MTH) equipment has precisely accurate wheel gauging. I had to regauge all of my Flyonel cars so they would operate on my scale style turnouts and crossings. The AM cars worked flawlessly. Interestingly the gauge of the engine wheelsets from Lionel is spot on so they know the correct gauge. To me this indicates Lionel makes the car wheels narrow intentionally to improve reliability on layouts that use the Gilbert style track.
I chose a less sophisticated approach to some AM coupler levers which hang too low for my Fastrack turnouts. I whipped out the Dremel and ground a millimeter or two off of the bottom of the button.
