A Quick Look At MTH Heavyweights

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

My interests are heavily biased toward passenger operations so anytime I can check out new equipment that can expand my already bloated roster, I’m ready to jump in with both feet!

I saw these heavyweight passenger cars when MTH announced them over a year ago. Recently they became available so I picked up a two car set intended to be an add-on to the five car package. I didn’t want to commit to all five cars (four of which are the 12-1) and I can always use more head-end equipment so the baggage/12-1 combo made sense.

I hope MTH offers other combinations and expands the line to include maybe a diner and RPO, some coaches and maybe a 6-3 or other common Pullman floor plan.

I never thought I’d be singing the praises of an MTH product but since acquiring the 1938 Century and 1941 Empire State Express cars I have grown to appreciate the fine engineering that went into Mike’s passenger cars. In many ways they are superior to similar offerings from Walthers, notably the “stay-alive” lighting already installed.

As near as I can tell there are only three cars available, a 72’ baggage, the 12-1 Pullman and a 10 section-buffet observation. The Pennsy baggage car has the round window doors found in later rebuilds. Rectangular windows are on the U.P. and Milwaukee versions.

The John Greenleaf Whittier was retired from service in 1963 and acquired by the Ohio Railroad Museum in Worthington, Ohio.

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=3323117

Crisp lettering in a good representation of PRR Buff is applied.

2

Ed, thank you for the detailed report, those cars look very nice.

Here is the one thing I do not understand about any of these new RTR passenger cars - the coupling distances between them. It ruins the appearance for me.

For that reason I will simply not spend that kind of money on them - MTH, Walthers, BLI, it matters not. That said, I am a freelance modeler and a willing kit builder, so I have other solutions.

I use American Limited diaphragms on my cars and couple them at nearly scale distances with the diaphragms always touching and they work perfectly.

It would seem to me that for all that money they could solve this issue?

Sheldon

3

Hi, Sheldon

Those MTH cars do have a pretty wide gap at the diaphragms! The draft gear do not have the same swing assembly that Walthers uses. The Walthers cars are a bit closer but there’s still the gap.

I wonder why more manufacturers don’t use the type of pivot (I’ll have to look up the name for it if there is one) where the gap widens on curves and tightens up in the straight run. Some BLI and Bachmann tender drawbars have used this link.

Of course, like anything else, there has to be a compromise on our tight curves and manufacturers don’t want to lose market share if their particular car requires a larger radius than most modelers can achieve.

Thanks for the comments, Ed

4

I understand about them not wanting to loose sales because the cars require too large a curve. It would seem to me rather simple to make a dual position coupler mounting.

The cars in my photo, admittedly ConCor shorties (72’), will run on 24" radius with no propblems. I have the same setup on 80’ cars which still handle 28" radius.

Admittedly my layout is all 36" radius and larger.

My process is simple, the body mounted couplers are long shank Kadee 30 series. The 30 series draft gear allows the widest possible swing, obviously the long coupler is set back on the car farther to get the close coupling.

The cars are spaced at about 30 scale inches, prototype spacing is about 22". So it is very close and looks very convincing.

While I do have a few 80’ cars, I actually pefer shorter cars for their “selective compression” effect - both regarding curves and other layout features like station platforms.

My typical passenger train is a prototypical 9 to 11 cars, sometimes longer.

Sheldon

[URL=http://s1002.photobucket.com/user/carrollhome/media/DSC00009.jpg.html][IMG]http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/af147/carrol

5

Thanks, Ed. Just a couple questions:

  1. PRR had hundreds of B60’s. How many B70’s did they have?

  2. Is there enough space to replace the long shank couplers with short shank? Would that be enough to significantly imporove the coupled appearance?

  3. When would the Pullman name have been removed and replaced with the Pennsylvania name? Would it be practical to make this change on the model without a complete repaint?

Tom

6

Hi, Tom

Trying to sort out a Pennsy roster can be a real chore but from what I can gather PRR had 56 B-70s like the MTH one. Then to go on to all the sub-classes I found rebuilds from BM-70s and these cars had smaller doors where the mail apartment had been then, of course there all the end door cars, scenery cars and horse cars and that’s just the 70 footers!

There’s really no room between the coupler head and the draft gear shelf to use a shorter-shanked coupler however MTH has provided an additional mounting hole to set the draft gear farther back. MTH says in the included instruction booklet that this will reduce the minimum radius to 42"

I recall hearing of some fellows that selected the optional mounting on one end only on the streamlined cars for a compromise. Maybe this would be a solution on these heavyweights but this reduces your switching and make-up of trains.

I should mention, too, that a steam heat connection is supplied to be installed by the user.

The interior is accessed by pulling the floor, with the trucks attached, up and out of the body.

The PULLMAN lettering is always a bit of an issue when dealing with the post 1944 antitrust settlement. Many of the cars were bought by the railroads then leased right back to Pullman. Sometimes retaining the Pullman on the letterboard, other times the railroad name was on the letterboard and a smaller PULLMAN was placed toward each end of the car. The actual repainting as a result of the court settlement didn’t begin until 1947.

Looking through the excellent book by Charles Blairdone and Peter Tilp, Pennsylvania Railroad Passenger Car Painting and Lettering I found that the Pullman issued lettering diagrams show Pennsylvania in 9" letters on the letterboard. These drawings are dated 1950.

However, I found dozens of photos of heavyweight cars still lettered Pullman even in the mid 1960s.

I cringe at the thought of a “patch-out” on a pa

7

I would be careful about the detail accuracies, there’s a good long discussion going on in the passenger car yahoo forum about the Queen Mary cars and the liberties MTH has been taking with accuracies incorrectly naming cars and so on. If you wanted to seriously research the histories on these cars you couldn’t rely on the MTH data. Some simple research they could get it right…but DOH! I have ZERO MTH stuff. I just got the BLI 4-12-2 and I blew over their 4-12-2, I waited. BLI got it right. MTH has an N&W passenger train and now I go err waitaminute…I bought some brass cars and I will research the interiors myself, you can buy interior details. Walthers has wide swing coupler mounts should you want to blow away MTH’s and get the spacing closer, and be able to run sharper radii. As nice as diaphrams are they are a derailing issue, weight your car down.

8

I think I understand what you are trying to say. Many manufacturers have made “foobies” and I’m not trying to imply that these latest cars from MTH are a rivet-for-rivet exact duplicate of the car for which it is named.

I thought I’d provide some photos for other modelers to look at and judge for themselves. The photos I found in the MTH catalog or other sites do not provide any details and my intent was to show some of these details and invite comments.

Here is an example of a Walthers PROTO car…

Not to be outdone, you can get it in PRR, too.

https://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/920-13023

The description says “Perfect for building realistic Budd passenger consists”

From the Walthers website describing their Proto line:

Working directly with railroad historical societies, museums and modeling authorities to obtain the most accurate data possible, each WalthersProto model is superbly detailed to match its prototype.

Will I stop buying Walthers passenger cars? Don’t think so…

I have a relatively large collection of brass passenger cars as well. Will I ever be able to fabricate accurate interiors for all of them in this lifetime… I highly doubt it. Overall, I think MTH has come a long way toward making a decent passenger car at a reasonable price. I like them, I’ll mix them in with my Walthers hea

9

Ed, Thanks for the detailed photos and explanations. It’s hard to evaluate these new items with the few clear images otherwise available. Our manufacturers and importers seem to have caught onto our desire for more and more prototypically-accurate locomotives and freight cars, but things have lagged a bit in the passenger car arena.

I think we modelers all need to understand the necessity to recoup development and tooling costs by offering more paint schemes than are strictly accurate for a mass market. And, obviously, the foobie passenger cars are successful, or Walthers, Rapido, or MTH wouldn’t produce them. But we can increase our store of knowledge and urge the manufacturers to bring us better copies, particularly when the cost to do so will be slight.

Again, thanks for the great photos.

– John

10

John,

I’m not against having accurate models, but there are some challenges that are not always understood.

First, most passengers cars were “nearly” one of a kind, especially streamlined cars. Sure, manufacturers had standard designs, but railroad nearly always requested specific features and identical cars were typically built in relatively small numbers.

Then, the railroads typically modified them the first time they needed a major overhaul.

So what is a manufacturer to do? Even with today’s much improved method of tooling, all thes

11

John, Sheldon, thanks for commenting.

I provided the photo of the NYC Budd dome car as a counterpoint to dinwitty’s warning to be careful about the liberties that MTH was taking with these cars, yet he wasn’t specific about what the problems were.

I was on the John Greenleaf Whittier when it was at the Ohio Railway Museum and I can attest that the MTH model is a very close representation of that car. Similarly, the Mt. Baxter was an open-end obs before its 1937 rebuilding into a solarium-lounge. I was on that car, too (after the rebuilding [:-^]) and I believe the MTH model is a good representation of that car as well.

As you state, Sheldon, to accurately represent a Pullman roster, or consist, at any given period in time you would have to research exactly which floor plan and exterior configuration that is correct for that moment in time.

In 1930 Pullman was operating some 8,000 cars (about 60% of these were the 12-1s that MTH chose to model). They were nearly always going through some kind of rebuilding as air conditioning, roller bearings, windows and especially, adding more rooms to replace the open berths that the travelling public began to shun in increasing numbers after the war.

Much of the information I have found comes from the excellent book, The Cars Of Pullman by Welsh, Howes and Holland.

Again, as Sheldon points out, there are very few models that are 100% exact representations of the prototype. Some are nearly perfect while others, like the NYC Budd dome, well…

So you have to decide what’s “good enough” for your needs. Personally, I’m thrilled to have the sheer volume of passenger cars available today that were only pipe dreams in the not too distant past of this hobby.

Happy modeling, Ed

12

Ed,

I agree it is wonderful that we have such a wide variety of passenger equipment, in a wide range of detail and price levels.

While I like to build models, I am by no means “anti RTR”, I buy my share of RTR as well as kits.

The other side of that however is that I model several prototype roads (B&O, C&O, WM) as well as my freelanced ATLANTIC CENTRAL, so building, painting and lettering cars is a big part of my modeling (I don’t think I have enough money to get MTH to do a run for my ACR).

And, I am by definition not a collector, I only buy/build stuff that fits the layout theme. I have some full length “accurate” scale cars, Branchline, Bachmann and others.

But I am just as happy with the visual effect of my Athearn and ConCor “generics” which have had details added, some heavily kitbashed into other styles, and which have all been modified for close coupling working diaphragms.

And, I am considering how one might do some “simple” kit bashes to model some of those unique B&O cars.

Sheldon

13

[quote user=“ATLANTIC CENTRAL”]

KK Bridge

gmpullman
I thought I’d provide some photos for other modelers to look at and judge for themselves. The photos I found in the MTH catalog or other sites do not provide any details and my intent was to show some of these details and invite comments.

Ed, Thanks for the detailed photos and explanations. It’s hard to evaluate these new items with the few clear images otherwise available. Our manufacturers and importers seem to have caught onto our desire for more and more prototypically-accurate locomotives and freight cars, but things have lagged a bit in the passenger car arena.

I think we modelers all need to understand the necessity to recoup development and tooling costs by offering more paint schemes than are strictly accurate for a mass market. And, obviously, the foobie passenger cars are successful, or Walthers, Rapido, or MTH wouldn’t produce them. But we can increase our store of knowledge and urge the manufacturers to bring us better copies, particularly when the cost to do so will be slight.

Again, thanks for the great photos.

– John

John,

I’m not against having accurate models, but there are some challenges that are not always understood.

First, most passengers cars were “nearly” one of a kind, especially streamlined cars. Sure, manufacturers had standard designs, but railroad nearly always requested specific features and identical cars were typically built in relatively s

14

[quote user=“KK Bridge”]

ATLANTIC CENTRAL

KK Bridge

gmpullman
I thought I’d provide some photos for other modelers to look at and judge for themselves. The photos I found in the MTH catalog or other sites do not provide any details and my intent was to show some of these details and invite comments.

Ed, Thanks for the detailed photos and explanations. It’s hard to evaluate these new items with the few clear images otherwise available. Our manufacturers and importers seem to have caught onto our desire for more and more prototypically-accurate locomotives and freight cars, but things have lagged a bit in the passenger car arena.

I think we modelers all need to understand the necessity to recoup development and tooling costs by offering more paint schemes than are strictly accurate for a mass market. And, obviously, the foobie passenger cars are successful, or Walthers, Rapido, or MTH wouldn’t produce them. But we can increase our store of knowledge and urge the manufacturers to bring us better copies, particularly when the cost to do so will be slight.

Again, thanks for the great photos.

– John

John,

I’m not against having accurate models, but there are some challenges that are not always understood.

First, most passengers cars were “nearly” one of a kind, especially streamlined cars.

15

When I saw the announcent of the MTH heavyweights, I was hoping that the observation would be a 10 section-lounge, since it hasn’t been done in plastic. Instead, the MTH observation is a drawing room parlor car, and the window arangement isn’t close to that of a 10 section-lounge.

The model appears to be a pretty-good representation of the PRR Queen Mary, which was a one-of-a-kind on that road. The model appears to have an ice activated air conditioning system, although the underbody component layout differs from that shown in the photo of the car in Vol. 3 of the PRR Color Guide to Freight and Passenger Equipment (p. 22). Also, the model rides on 2410 drop equalizer trucks rather than the prototype’s 242 straight equalizer trucks.

16

Ed, I’m just getting around to reading your post and all the others who have answered it as well. This was a well prepared and stated overview in the world of passenger car models (at least the two companies mentioned) and I found it very informative and helpful as I select the passenger cars needed to equip my layout. The photos and comparisons much appreciated! I guess I stand with those who want to run a most accurate and reslistic design of model cars (within limits) as is possible; with the emphasis on “running them” rather on the little intricacies that modelers lose sleep over! I too am amazed at the detail that occurs today than when I first ran HO in the 60s! Thx for your submission; well done!

17

Thanks, Bob. Glad it helped you out.

These cars, and the lightweight ones, too, are still holding up well. I sure wish they would have expanded the line of heavyweights to include a diner and perhaps RPO and a few other Pullman floorplans but I don’t see anything coming anytime soon…

Thanks again, Ed