LEOFUTURE perhaps consider drawbar if you don't uncouple them frequently
perhaps consider drawbar if you don't uncouple them frequently
I believe just about anything He does, will be iffy...85ft. cars were just not made to work well on small radius curves.....
Take Care!
Frank
CMStPnP I have very sharp radius curves 22 inch and less and I need to make some modification to get the cars to work better on my layout. To prempt the inevitable suggestion, no I can't go to a higher curve radius due to space.
.
I am in the same situation. I need 22" curves to make the layout plan fit in the limited space I have.
All the 22" curves will be hidden, but I still need to make careful consideration that all the equipment will work on these curves.
-Kevin
Living the dream.
CMStPnP zstripe If He is referring to Walthers Mainline 85ft, cars...they come with Talgo style trucks, with coupler pocket being part of the truck and that is the cause of derailment problems with backing up. The fix is to cut off the pocket on the truck and install the swing arm coupler pockets that Gmpullman suggested. Thats it, they are factory painted yellow and gray Milwaukee Road Cars. Thanks for the tip. I will get some ordered and try that. They look really nice moving forwards behind the Milwaukee F-7 no operational issues.......except for tha backing up where they seem to consume beween 1/4 and 1/8 inch of slack per car. So on the couplers, I have kadee #5 installed on my older cars and they all work fine and return to center line once uncoupled. These newer ones sometimes stay off center and refuse to couple on straight track. It could be the plastic fin or spring in the coupler box that needs attention. Again Walthers brand, hate to pick on them. Well see how my testing goes on Sunday with the other Mfr cars. Another frustration, the newer Walthers frieght cars (60 and 50 ft), derailing on the sharp curves, and I can feel the flanges scrape against the underframe on sharp curves, going to look there first. Lucky for me I have a whole box full of 60-50 and 40 foot boxcars from the more flexible days of HO Scale Model railroading and they handle the sharp curves just fine with no flange binding (Mixure of Roundhouse, Atherarn blue box, and some other brands). So I am very happy I kept those. It seems the flanges on them are also a little deeper than the newer cars as well. Have to do more testing Sunday to see if the loco coupler is an issue with pulling them off the rails. If not then I am going to take the old dremel tool to the underside of the Walthers freight cars. Standards have changed a bit I think with the wheelsets and couplers since the late 1980's when I was last active in the hobby. Strange thing is NO PROBLEMS with the 4-6 axle diesel locos when they run independently. Just starting to test with coupled freight car consists. So far Atlas has the loudest sound card and most realistic sounding bell and their headlights auto dim with the crawl speed vs. staying constantly bright. The DCC testing is going just fine. I have muliple locos operational on one section of track tested already. Going to test consists tonight. I need to install the Digitrax auto reverse on the two lower reverse loops and test that as well.
zstripe If He is referring to Walthers Mainline 85ft, cars...they come with Talgo style trucks, with coupler pocket being part of the truck and that is the cause of derailment problems with backing up. The fix is to cut off the pocket on the truck and install the swing arm coupler pockets that Gmpullman suggested.
Thats it, they are factory painted yellow and gray Milwaukee Road Cars. Thanks for the tip. I will get some ordered and try that. They look really nice moving forwards behind the Milwaukee F-7 no operational issues.......except for tha backing up where they seem to consume beween 1/4 and 1/8 inch of slack per car.
So on the couplers, I have kadee #5 installed on my older cars and they all work fine and return to center line once uncoupled. These newer ones sometimes stay off center and refuse to couple on straight track. It could be the plastic fin or spring in the coupler box that needs attention. Again Walthers brand, hate to pick on them. Well see how my testing goes on Sunday with the other Mfr cars.
Another frustration, the newer Walthers frieght cars (60 and 50 ft), derailing on the sharp curves, and I can feel the flanges scrape against the underframe on sharp curves, going to look there first.
Lucky for me I have a whole box full of 60-50 and 40 foot boxcars from the more flexible days of HO Scale Model railroading and they handle the sharp curves just fine with no flange binding (Mixure of Roundhouse, Atherarn blue box, and some other brands). So I am very happy I kept those. It seems the flanges on them are also a little deeper than the newer cars as well. Have to do more testing Sunday to see if the loco coupler is an issue with pulling them off the rails. If not then I am going to take the old dremel tool to the underside of the Walthers freight cars. Standards have changed a bit I think with the wheelsets and couplers since the late 1980's when I was last active in the hobby.
Strange thing is NO PROBLEMS with the 4-6 axle diesel locos when they run independently. Just starting to test with coupled freight car consists. So far Atlas has the loudest sound card and most realistic sounding bell and their headlights auto dim with the crawl speed vs. staying constantly bright.
The DCC testing is going just fine. I have muliple locos operational on one section of track tested already. Going to test consists tonight. I need to install the Digitrax auto reverse on the two lower reverse loops and test that as well.
The Walthers passenger cars have a minimum radius (at least as advertised) of 24"R, so most likely you will have to modify them to get them to run well on tighter curves.
It wouldn't be that odd that a large engine can take a fairly sharp curve by itself, but have trouble when coupled to a car or another engine (especially if the other item is also pretty long).
If your Atlas engine is a newer Atlas Gold engine, it has an ESU Loksound sound decoder. They're generally considered 'top of the line' for sound - in case you want to install one in a non-sound engine down the road. Lights, sound volumes, choice of bell, horn etc. can all be adjusted by changing CVs on the decoder - although LokSounds ones aren't as simple as some other decoders (TCS, MRC).
He will more than likely need to do the same thing to the engine He is pulling it with.......85ft cars just are not made for small radius curves........
What I've done with my Walthers cars (Milwaukee Hiawatha and GN Empire Builder) is to designate a defined front and rear, and replace the front coupler on each car with a Kadee No.5 with the long shank (rather than the regular shank). That leaves enough room between cars that the diaphragms don't touch, even when backing up. However, I'm running 28"R curves, for 22"R you might need to use the long shanks on both ends of the cars?
Thanks for the video, I need time to watch it end to end.
So far it seems the older HO Scale freight cars have no issues with the curves on the new layout which is awesome. Just have to modify the few new ones I bought. I have some old open rack bachman auto racks I need to test. Might be asking too much with those but.....we'll see. So far dodged a bullet on this issue.....whew!
I kind of want to get a photo bucket account to post videos and such to make my posts easier to understand. If I do I will start a new thread.
Rigged up the PTB-100 with a SPST toggle switch so I can cut power to programming track now and it is not always on when the NCE power pack is on.
Jason Hill of Owl Mountain Railways discussed pushing their flat cars and the role of leverage induced by the amount of swing in the coupler. At 23:50
Henry
COB Potomac & Northern
Shenandoah Valley
zstripeIf He is referring to Walthers Mainline 85ft, cars...they come with Talgo style trucks, with coupler pocket being part of the truck and that is the cause of derailment problems with backing up. The fix is to cut off the pocket on the truck and install the swing arm coupler pockets that Gmpullman suggested.
zstripe If He is referring to Walthers Mainline 85ft, cars...they come with Talgo style trucks,
I assumed Proto since the Mainline cars weren't offered in Milwaukee lettering, unless he repainted them.
https://www.walthers.com/products/passenger-car-sale-mainline
Cheers, Ed
Great, I'm going to have to try those.
Mike.
My You Tube
I don't believe it is due to coupler slack. The Walthers Protomax couplers are just as good as Kadee couplers. If He is referring to Walthers Mainline 85ft, cars...they come with Talgo style trucks, with coupler pocket being part of the truck and that is the cause of derailment problems with backing up. The fix is to cut off the pocket on the truck and install the swing arm coupler pockets that Gmpullman suggested. I have ten of those mainline cars and converted all of them to metal trucks/wheels with the light kit and the swing arm body mounted couplers. I used 30 series Kadee 1/4'' shank couplers to get the diaphragms to just barely touch.....but I have no curves under 36''. All the holes that you would need to install the swing arm couplers are already in the bottom chassis of the cars. In Your case You can use the couplers that came with it,,,,they should be Protomax.
A pic' of how they go on the car and what they look like:
There's a lot of slack in Kadee couplers.
Ed
It's not so much the slack but the tendency for the "compression" of the back up move to push the pivoting draw bar toward the outside of the arc of the car centerline.
This, in turn, shortens the distance between the cars and you have the problem of the car bodies touching, snagging then derailing.
Walthers has made a "slightly" longer swing drawbar assembly specifically designed to give a little more spacing between cars. These may help but they will still want to push outward. They just might give you the slight distance you need.
https://www.walthers.com/long-shank-extended-drawbar-20-pack
Good Luck, Ed
I have the impression that the Walthers couplers are clones of Kadee #5's. Others will correct me. If they are, there's no point in changing them. I think.
Dummy couplers would have less coupler slack, if you could find any. The Sergent couplers have little slack, also; but that's probably a direction you don't want to go.
So I have very sharp radius curves 22 inch and less and I need to make some modification to get the cars to work better on my layout. To prempt the inevitable suggestion, no I can't go to a higher curve radius due to space.
Anyways, by removing a diaphram between cars, they work fine now if they are always forward moving without much loss of realism in how the cars look. The problem is when I back the cars up, the Walthers selected couplers take up a lot of slack between cars, so much so that the car bodies touch when backing up causing the cars to snag on the end of car details and derail while backing through a curve or into a #6 switch.
My question is, would replacing the couplers with kadee #5 eliminate the slack when backing up? Or is there another method to do so?
I am hoping this is the last short raidius curve issue that I need to fix with these cars.
I have another issue with the Atheran Milw Rd GP9 pulling one of my short high cubes around the 22 inch raidius curve the locomotive coupler it seems can't take the curve properly and pulls the first car off the track.....which I think is rather sad, it should at least be able to navigate a 22 inch curve. Again it is the manufacturer installed couplers that seem to be the issue, wondering if replacing them with Kadee #5 will fix my issue there as well. Without the GP9 the cars navigate the curve fine. Going to try with my MP15AC and then a Atlas loco tonight and see if there is a difference between all three. The manufacturer installed couplers just seem like junk to me.