banjoflyer posted:TOKELLY posted:This is where Lionel can make improvements. Yes, the cylindrical hoppers had additional problems; but it would have nice to keep the original trucks and change out the high-rail wheel sets for prototypical scale wheel sets if one were not bothered by the excessive height of the bolsters. Those trucks are beautiful--but it costs $25 to replace the entire truck instead of salvaging the truck and changing just the wheels.
I thought the majority of the initial run of these hoppers all came with scale wheel sets. It wasn't until a second run before trucks with highrail wheel sets factory installed appeared. But I distinctly remember many scale guys complaining about the original scale trucks. The bolsters were way too tall (on both the scale and highrail versions) but they also complained that the wheel sets weren't in the proper "gauge" for scale operation? To fix that a lot of modification to the axle had to be made. I noted that the original scale wheel sets performed perfectly on AF Fastrack but that didn't work for the scale guys who used different track.
Anyway, since I only use AF Fastrack those hoppers worked well for me either scale or highrail.
Mark
You can see why the scale guys complained about the wheel gauge. Note the right flange riding up on the guardrail:
Now, the design of the axle made it possible to regauge the wheels with relative ease, but then there was that bolster height which made the car sit about a 1/4" too high. The BN is unmodified, the PRR has AM trucks.
Lionel apparently was aware of this, because they included a spacer to bring the Kadee coupler down to the correct height, a rather half-baked solution. When the car is at the correct height, no spacer is needed.
Now, before anyone says the excess height was needed to clear the flanges, after I converted my BN car to scale, I re-converted it back to hirail using AM trucks with SHS hirail wheels and the SHS Flyer compatible coupler. It ran just fine on R20 curves:
After these photo were taken, I reconverted the BN car back to scale. The whole process of the back and forth took less than 10 minutes each way. If the Lionel truck bolster were correctly made, I wouldn't have used the AM trucks because, bolster aside, the Lionel roller bearing trucks are also very nice.
The truck fiasco aside, these are VERY nice cars. I also have the Frisco and GN cars so converted to scale.
As I've said before Lionel has demonstrated they CAN make a car that is suitable for both worlds. However, the folks at Lionel never really properly addressed the truck issue IMHO, rather they seemed to put the blame on the consumer for not really accepting the cylindrical hoppers. That seems to be the reason (again IMHO) the 57' mechanical reefers were cancelled, not at the preorder cut-off date, but rather at the anticipated delivery date months later.
Cars acceptable for both Flyer and Scale folks isn't rocket science.
Rusty
