Williams Passenger Cars

[ttt]

For those of you that have Williams passenger cars, how would you rate the quality of the cars on a scale of 0 to 5? (5 being the best)

[dwiemer]

Depends.  Not trying to be funny here, but depending on the era, the quality varies greatly.  I have some older ones that have straight shaft axles that ride rough and have a lot of drag.  They are on the basic side.  I also have some needle bearing axles on some madison style that are nice.  Neither have detailed interiors, so you couldn't match them up against the scale ones put out by Lionel, MTH, etc.

Dennis

[ttt]

I think that I'm looking to buy a few 60' aluminum streamliners from their most recent catalog. Are they scale, close to scale, or traditional size?

[rtraincollector]

As Dennis stated they don't have the detail of the other manufactures but there not bad either for the price the ones coming out now are good. I have them and also I have rail-king semi scale 70' and I like the rail-king as it has seats and tables and even have toilets and sinks in them for me to add painted figures to. I will be detailing them and these I have behind a Williams scale GG-1 the Williams with the silhouettes in them I have behind my 681 and they look good.

[rtraincollector]

ttt

I think that I'm looking to buy a few 60' aluminum streamliners from their most recent catalog. Are they scale, close to scale, or traditional size?

 

I would think by looking at mine there more your traditional size as mine ar 14" long and are claimed to be 60' cars

[steinmike]

ttt:

The recent offerings from Williams (say since 2001 onwards) have been very good.

The 60' Aluminum passenger cars from Williams are nearly identical to the same cars issued by Lionel in the post-war years and re-issued recently (the 2500 series cars, NOT the 2400 series 027 cars).  Like the originals, they are compressed models of 80' passenger cars (more in length than in height and width).

The cars run well and Williams has sets of matching Madison-style cars so you can create a train composed of mixed heavyweight and streamlined cars if you wish (the NYC and PRR did this as well as other lines).  Like the postwar cars they have passenger silohuettes on the windows and bulbs for interior illumination, as compared to more modern sets that have detailed interiors.

Williams also has a line of 72' scale streamlined cars - haven't run them, but see from the catalog that these have plastic shells rather than aluminum and if you prefer something closer to scale, you might want to take a look at these.

Hope this helps,

Mike

 

 

[ttt]

Thanks Mike. I do like the look of the 72' passenger cars but they have to run on O42 curves or bigger and the curves on my layout are O36. I will probably buy the 60' cars.

[steinmike]

You're welcome, glad I could help.

I noticed that there wasn't much in the William's catalog for D&H (which is sad since the D&H had a great route in northern NY along Lake Champlain), but thinking that since the Laurentian usually had a good number of NY Central cars in the consist on the way north from Albany that you might be able to cobble together a nice consist using a pair of RF-16 Sharks, lettered for D&H in the "Blue Warbonnet" paint scheme, a four car set of NYC heavyweights (baggage, two coaches, and a observation), and a two car set of C&O streamliners (combine and coach) which would be plausible since C&O either sold off or leased a lot of their passenger equipment to other roads.

Good luck, who knows, maybe Williams might consider offering the Madison cars in D&H livery.

Mike