Oooops! Baby Madison truck replacement...

[Kooljock1]

In the current CTT, a reader asks about replacing the current four-wheel plastic trucks and couplers on his 1977 Southern Crescent Baby Madison cars with die-cast trucks and couplers.

The published answer instructs the reader to obtain sets of die-cast six-wheel trucks from a Lionel parts dealer.

I hope the reader see this before laying out the cash.

The pre-1978 Lionel Baby Madison Cars were designed for four-wheel trucks.  The early ones came with plastic four-wheel "wood-beam" 19th Century passenger trucks with separately applied "dummy" couplers screwed directly into the car body.  With the 1977 Southern Crescent cars, the dummy couplers were replaced by operating couplers mounted directly to the plastic four-wheel wood-beam trucks.

In 1978, Lionel cataloged the Jersey Central "Blue Comet" set.  For this set, the cars were equipped with die-cast six-wheel passenger trucks.  Lenny Dean and the marketing people at Lionel thought this was a great idea to make the Blue Comet release "special".  Problem was, the under-body tooling for the Baby Madison cars was never made to accommodate such a long truck, and the wheel sets banged into the heating and air conditioning units and battery boxes under the cars.  Lionel tooling engineers had to re-tool the undersides of the Baby Madison cars for the Blue Comet and all following sets.

In short, while you CAN use the six-wheel die-cast trucks on Polar Express cars, you CANNOT use them on the Milwaukee Road, Pennsylvania, Baltimore & Ohio, or Southern cars from the mid-1970's.

Jon

[Bob Keller]

Thanks Jon, we've had some comments about this, and I'll work them into Joe's column.

[BigAl 956]

I think the baby Madison trucks from the 70s are not available as replacement parts in either 6 or 4 wheel versions.

[ADCX Rob]

This subject was just covered HERE 3-8-14 too.

ADCX Rob

kiana

1. Without making any changes to either car I verified the 600-9536-080 all metal truck is fully compatible with the 9500 cars. (For example – the hole in the body mold for mounting trucks is identical.)

I welcome your comments. 

The 600-9536-080 all metal truck is NOT fully compatible with the 9500 cars. It will only work on those cars made in 1978 or later, as the tool was changed to allow clearance for the 6 wheel trucks. It's not really obvious unless you have 1 of each side-by-side to compare.

[steinmike]

This is doubly sad since CTT had a feature article on the "Baby Madison" cars in the past, and this was covered there.  Oops!  Someone at CTT didn't do their research.

I wasn't going to bring this up, but since we are on the subject of the knowledge of some of CTT's staffers, but did anyone notice a caption in the March, 2013 (last year) issue of CTT  on the top of page 13, that stated in part:

"...Who knows what the passengers aboard that Pennsylvania RR heavyweight train from MTH think when..."

We'll never know since the passenger cars in the shot (baggage car, coach, dome) are most definitely lightweight cars and they are 2400-series re-issues from Lionel (not MTH).

Oh, well....