Funny, I've never had much trouble with stock MDC and Athearn trucks & wheelsets, once I get rid of the flash and add a little graphite. I have had the odd issue with Walthers trucks (remember the sprung ones? UGH). I generally use Athearn as replacements because I tend to have a couple on hand. The Kadee and Kato get saved for special stuff, or for real "problem children". B-Dubya, ever the cheapskate
Hey Bent Nose, do you still have any of the Walthers HO sprung trucks left over intact? I have good luck with them. I just traded for 6 more pair of them, with a guy who wanted plastic trucks. As I understand him, Walthers bought out Central Valley Co. to corner the market, and now sell the Central Valley trucks under the Walthers name, and as usual, raised the price too. If this is true, then the bolsters and side frames are blackened Zamac #4 or #5, have brass wheels with RP-25 flanges and tiny coiled springs. Any one wheel will raise or go below grade 1/32" with all remaining wheels still level. This allows very smooth running when the car is weighted correctly. The 6 wheel Commonwealth trucks work the same way. When the plastic 6 wheel trucks came out, like on Rivarossi passenger cars, the center pair of wheels would cause the front pair to raise up when going over a hump which allowed the front flange to ride over the rail and derail. By changing to Central Valley trucks, they solved that problem. There were also some freight trucks made with a bent brass bolster that used a shouldered brass screw to mount the cast side frames to the bolster. This allowed the side frames to rotate up and down so the wheels could ossillate inorder to follow humps and dips in the rails. These tucks also had brass wheels. When going over an Atlas #4 switch, the wheel can fall down in the gap at the frog and still climb back up onto the rail without "picking" the point, like rigid trucks do. Adding weight, or using a larger switch number will also solve the "picking" problem though. Another thing I found on today's NS rails, is that they have a sharp edge when they were rolled to shape, unlike the old drawn brass rails that had a tiny radius there. This sharp edge sheared tiny cuttings off the flanges of the new plastic wheels on curves. I had a lot of trouble with plastic wheels climbing over the curves when I used to use 18" curved track. When I was about ready to give up, my dad got his Jeweler's loupe and looked along the rail to see if there was a nick or burr that was "hooking" the soft plastic wheels. What he found was what looked like black dust all along the inside of the outside rail in that curve! He put some under his microscope and they turned out to be shavings of plastic that looked just as if you had turned the wheels on a lathe! Now I run a fine finishing file at a 45 degree angle along the inside on all rails before laying track. I have never had a derailing problem for that reason since then. This solved the same problem on N scale curves, which were much smaller than mine. Try it, you may find you can run around the 9-3/4" N radiused curves better too. Just knock off the sharp edge, don't remove too much railhead! Then vacuum up the cuttings afterward! I machined a curved test track with a hump, and a dip on the outside rail to test trucks with. Any truck passing this test track, has never derailed at any speed. I also use a tiny counter sink to remove the sharp edge left on the inside of molded side frames.
I'll look and see if I have any left, but the ones I had were plastic, not metal. The last set worked aceptably, but I change them when given half a chance. Leave that with me till the first of the week, I won't have a chance to look until the weekend. B-Dubya
The last ones I bought were plastic also, and I had to add extra weight to get the car to "spring" the trucks correctly. I didn't know Central Valley even made plastic trucks until then. They still cost $2.25 a pair, but should have been cheaper since they were just plastic. I am hoping the 6 pr I just bought are the older metal ones, they are the best, and work easily. I have never had a metal Central Valley one to derail yet, even when pushing 86 foot dinning cars back through a #10 switch. In fact when I was using #6 switches, they didn't derail either, but the rigid plastic crawled over rails regularly. I haven't used #4 switches since the early 60's but then I went more "scale" and had the room ever since too.
