marriedshades
Member
What a good opinion. between metal wheels to plastic wheels on rolling stock. or is there a big difference plan to upgrade my couplers thought might do the wheel on the cheeper cars don't seem follow the track as well.
Well I actually prefer the silence of the plastic to the tinny clicky sound of the metal, which really really don't sound right to me. Can't afford a "wheel sound" decoder in each car though.G nasty and don't even sound right..
Not just the thickness of the axle but the length too. For example the Proto-2000 wheel sets are shorter than the Athearn Blue box. At the club I noticed the trains were "wandering" down the track. Finally realized it was because we had just changed out all the wheel sets. The Athearn BB slopped side to side or even leaned over on the shorter axles...a word of caution though ..some aftermarket wheelset brands have a thicker bevelled axle end and on cheaper trucks these don't ALWAYS match up perfectly and may need to hone out slightly the trucksd
The only 29" wheels I know of are the old Rivarossi pizza cutter wheels on their passenger cars. They made the wheels smaller to help the cars turn the tight corners. 36" is prototypical for almost all passenger cars. 33" is the most common freight size in the united states up until just about a decade ago. In the last decade the modern freight cars have been moving to 36" and even 39" wheels. So for the modern freight cars, research would have to be done to find out the correct wheel size. The problem there is one doesn't know if the manufacturer used the prototypical size or not.I went to buy some new metal wheel sets and couplers the other week from my LHS and was told that I needed to know what sizes I needed for both the wheel sets and couplers. They said there was 36", 32" and I think 29" wheel sets. If wheel sets vary in size, how do you know what size to buy? Do these "bulk" sets come with a selection of sizes?
I've had really good luck replacing just the wheels with metal ones. I bought a bulk pack of 100 wheelsets and went to town on all the cars that had plastic wheels. There is definitely a noticeable difference.
Jeff