I have two Athearn RTR boxcars that wobble or, maybe I should say, shake and shimmy, as they are pulled down the tracks.
These boxcars have Kadee #5 couplers and springs installed and Intermountain metal wheels.
Each car is 7 inches long, and each weighs 4.75 ounces.
The trucks are screwed into the frame.
What is wrong with these two cars and how can I get the wobbling, shaking, shimmying, to stop?
Rich
Rich:
A couple of things I can think of right off the bat–possibly one of the trucks is warped. Are these the newer Athearns from China? If so, you might want to replace the trucks themselves with ones from Intermountain.
One thing you might try is leaving one truck relatively loose, and tightening the other so that it just swivels without any ‘up and down’ motion. I’ve done that with some ‘wobbly’ cars and it seems to work pretty well.
Just my thoughts.
Tom
Tom,
These two box cars are about 8 years old. They have always wobbled, so I have always left them on a siding. But, now, I am determined to fix all of these cars. Only these two cars haunt me and try my patience.
I will go down to the layout right now and try your suggestion with the trucks.
Rich
Hmm, all that sounds good. Right weight, right couplers, good wheels. Let’s assume you have cleaned the wheels to eliminate any trouble from build up of “wheel cheese” on the treads. You want to adjust the tightness of the truck screws carefully. Tighten the screws down until the truck won’t swivel and then back off a quarter of a turn or thereabouts. One truck ought to be as tight as possible to eliminate side to side rocking of the truck. The other truck ought to be a little bit looser to let the track follow rises and dips in the track. Make sure the tops of the wheels don’t hit anything on the bottom of the car. Both trucks ought to be parallel to the car bottom, not cocked to one side or the other.
If additional weight was added to make up the 4.75 oz ( sounds correct) is it on the floor or glued to the roof? The floor would be the correct locaton.
Check the wheels. If the wheels wobble,the whole car will wobble. I prefer metal wheels anyway, so I have stacks of plastic ones removed from those brands that still supply plastic wheels. I happen to use Proto 2000 wheelsets, others will fit the Athearn trucks just fine.
–Randy
Tom’s suggestions should do the trick, but if not, check to ensure that those metal wheels are pressed-on perpendicular to their axles, and you may want to use your truck tuner on the journals, just in case there’s any foreign material present.
As for the extra weight, the best place is near the ends of the car and centred from side to side (placing it in the centre of the car may cause all-plastic floors to sag). The amount of weight added should be the same at both ends, but the height at which it’s installed is immaterial unless your trains are run at warp speeds. [swg]
Wayne
I too use the Proto wheels, They work well.
I had a wobbler that I fixed with a wider diameter plastic washer I made, to spread the contact area of the truck’s attachment point (with the original small washer also used) laterally, so that there was more stability. I also used metal wheels/trucks as they give more presence to the contact point. Cedarwoodron
If the coupler height is dead-on, I would check the bolster that the truck swivels on. I have seen them so thick that even when the truck mounting screw is tight the trucks wobble. Gently file it so that you can tighten the screw to the point that the truck barely swivels and rocks, then back off the screw about 1/4 turn. Don’t take too much off, you don’t want to file the bolster completely off.
If the couplers are a little low, Kadee makes shims that will take up that extra looseness and raise the coupler.
Sounds like the trucks may be loose…I have around 60 of these RTR cars and had to tighten the truck screws on 4 of them…
Guys,These RTR cars comes with metal wheels-not plastic.To date I have never found a reason to replace these trucks or wheels .
I tried all of the various fixes suggested here, and I appreciate all of the advice from everyone.
Turned out to be the problem that doctorwayne suggested.
I got out my Micro Mark truck tuner and reamed every one of the four axle points on each truck. I reamed them until I could remount the two wheelsets on each truck and get them to roll freely, to the extent that I could roll a truck over 30 feet of track or more.
The wobbling all but stopped. I am guessing that the truck condition was such that the wheelsets were rolling out of round. That had never crossed my mind. Problem solved!
Incidentally, I had not added weight to these cars. They were weighted properly by Athearn. Each 7 inch box car weighed 4.50 ounces to 4.75 ounces.
Thanks again to everyone.
Rich
Rich:
Glad you got the problem solved–those MicroMark truck tuners are absolutely ESSENTIAL, IMO. I know they’ve saved my life from time with recalcitrant rolling stock!
Tom
Tom,
I agree.
I have been in the HO scale side of the hobby for over 8 years now and never used the truck tuner until one of my train friends suggested it about a month ago.
I had just started tuning up my entire fleet of rolling stock so I bought the truck tuner from MIcro Mark. I had thought that my rolling stock was sufficiently free rolling, but after a truck tuning, the cars would just fly down the track.
A truck tuner should be considered a mandatory tool for every model railroader.
Rich
Hi!
It just doesn’t seem right that some of today’s RTR cars are often not up to basic standards. That “RTR” moniker is just not fitting, even for some of the more costly ones.
I’ve got a roster of 250 freight cars, with about 170 being the old Athearn or Athearn sourced (i.e. bevbel) kits. These were almost never a problem. If you did have a wobble or the like you would make one truck somewhat tight, and the other loose and that would fix it.
My roster has 22 “RTR” freight cars. All but two of them needed coupler replacement and/or truck replacement/adjustments.
Ha, as alluded to in an earlier posting, “its a good thing most of us are tinkerers”!
Hey, the above is just my view from my experience. Like they say, “for what its worth”!
ENJOY!
Apparently, with some rolling stock, RTR means “Ready To Repair”.
The above is the standard fix for Athearn blue box freight cars (or RTR cars based on blue box cars or their design).
Any freight cars which have the raised lip on the bolster is prone to shaking and wobbling because the trucks are quite loosely attached. The manufacturers designed them that way to ensure the trucks would always be able to freely swivel without binding but it they are also prone to rocking or shaking.
Unscrewing the trucks from the bolster and filing down the lip allows you to tighten the screw further down so you can actually prevent the trucks from swiveling - so just back off the screw just enough to allow the truck to swivel freely but not rock or be very loose. The 1/4 turn is the general wisdom but common sense is to tighten it down so the truck won’t swivel at all, and then back it off just enough so that it swivels freely and won’t rock. I actually do this with both trucks but the 3-point tune up says to only do it to one of the trucks and let the other one be more loose. I do it to both because inevidably, one will get a little too loose anyway and this way I increase chances that both won’t and the feight car won’t rock in the future.
As for wheel wobble, check to make sure none of the wheel sets are “out of round” or bend, but spinning each while, one at a time, to see if it spins smoothly or if it wobbles w
If your “wobbly” cars are lettered for Penn Central then that could explain everything: you may – or you may not depending on your age – remember that when Penn Central went into bankruptcy in 1970 everything wobbled!
Seriously, however, most of my experience with “wobbly/shakey” cars eventually boiled down to a defective wheelset. Sometime it’s a bent axle – sometimes the wheel is skewed on the axle. Remove the trucks and roll them slowly down the track; often your problem will be self-evident. Should that not be so then you are going to have to remove the wheelsets from their truck and roll them down the track using a finger on the axle to provide a very light pressure. Sometimes the errant wheelset will give you a noticable vibration.
At worst you may have to replace all your wheelsets with aftermarket ones … which may not be a bad idea anyway.
There is one other thing: make sure your trucks are FIRM NOT TIGHT with the underframe.
Same here. I replace all plastic wheels with metal. I haven’t had many of the good quaity metal wheelsets (Intermountain, ExactRail, Kadee) that were problematic, but they do exist. I would suspect a wheelset as the issue before I’d suspect a truck.
I know the feeling, I bought RTR plug doors for over a year and when time to ckeck them and replace the couplers, I found all sorts of issues w/ just about half of them. Some were simple fixes. They were a collection of over a dozen RTR Athearn/ and genesis, Atlas and a couple P2K. The trucks on Genesis were perfect however replacing the couplers is another tale in itself (foolish methed of draft cover on top and break air hoses 1/2 the time), The Athearn RTR were straightforward in coupler change but needed some bolster work and truck tuning w/ wheelset replacement. The Atlas (worst junk 2 piece plastic coupler but easy change. and then that plastic push pin bolster. Alnong w/ the high bolster shoulder and the pin not holding the truck and no adjustment, had to drill out and tap for screws. The Atlas didn’t wobble that bad, and no where near the Athearn RTR but such a detailed car to need this much work is a sin. The Protos needed nothing except my usual replacement to Kadees.