I've received good advice on which wheels to replace the old plastic wheels on the blue box cars, most of which are box cars (33 inch). That project is going well. Now, I've discovered several of the older trucks are really worn out, so I need new trucks. Looking through the Athearn parts list, I have no idea which trucks are the proper ones. Anyone here know which trucks I need to be looking for and/or replacements from other vendors?
Gidday, As you've realised all Athearn BB trucks are not the same, the best I can offer is this link to a PDF on freight Car Trucks, courtesy of our Hosts,.....
http://mrr.trains.com/~/media/import/files/pdf/4/c/c/mr_pi_5-06_freightcartrucks.ashx
......and leave you to eyeball what you have and what replacement you require. I have no particular axe to grind on this subject, but there are plenty of other HO truck manufacturers.
http://www.modeltrainstuff.com/HO-Scale-Trucks-Wheelsets-s/1469.htm
http://www.hobbylinc.com/cgi-bin/s8.cgi?cat_s=URI&tag0_i=955
Hope this doesn't confuse the issue.
Cheers, the Bear.
"One difference between pessimists and optimists is that while pessimists are more often right, optimists have far more fun."
Go to this site, http://hoseeker.net/athearn.htm, look under the Athearn picture, and use the drop down menu to find the car you have. Most of those blue box cars used one of about three or four trucks that Athearn provided, a Bettendorf-style and two different flavors of roller bearing style. For example, this boxcar http://hoseeker.net/athearninstructionscars1970/50sdboxcar.jpg used an ath90400, and this tank car http://hoseeker.net/athearninstructionscars1970/62tankcar1996.jpg used an ath90399.
You have to use the "ath" in front of the number to find these items on the Athearn website. For example, here is the Ath90399, http://www.athearn.com/Search/Default.aspx?SearchTerm=ath90399, unfortunately out of stock. And here is the ath90400, http://www.athearn.com/Search/Default.aspx?SearchTerm=ath90400.
Whether or not you'd want to spend $5.98 plus tax/shipping is another story. You'd probably do better searching through the $2.00 cars found under the tables at train shows for old Athearn cars that have the trucks you need.
Many brands of HO trucks will work under the Athearn cars.
Note that Athearn often used (and still does even on its RTR stuff) trucks that weren't necessarily appropriate for the car, so a direct replacement isn't always the best choice. If you care to look at similar prototypes on a site like Railcarphotos or rr-fallenflags you may find a photo that will tell you what kind of truck to look for, but a lot of Atheran paint jobs, and even entire cars, are more or less made up so research doesn't help in all cases.
For a general idea of appropriate truck styles for older cars (pre-1960), you could try the article by Richard Hendrickson in the May, 2013 issue of Model Railroad Hobbyist which can be downloaded for free or you can just read the article here http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/magazine/mrh-2013-05-may/freight-trucks-1900-1960 .
Trucks from Accurail, Intermountain, ExactRail and others should work in most instances, and at least in the case of Intermountain and ExactRail already come with high quality wheelsets. Accurail offers trucks without wheels so you can substitute your brand of choice, and they work well with Intermountain or ExactRail wheelsets. Athearn's current trucks also come with nice machined wheelsets. Tahoe Model Works makes a good selection of trucks too.
Rob Spangler
If these are the older trucks with real springs in them, and the problem is that they are loosy-goosey and won't hold the wheels, a simple fix may be to simply glue the frames together with CA. You really don't need the extra flex that you get from the springs. I've done that to a few of them, and they seem be holding up just fine.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.