I’ve decided to purchase, for the first time, some RTR intermodal well cars. I’ve looked over several different manufacturers, but just want to get opinions on which manufacturers you liked best for the following:
I know that I’ll need to tweak them straight from the box, things like journal clean out, wheel friction, truck tightness, weighting, couplers…etc. But want to get more details about the following.
Overall product quality
Overall product details
Overall product weighting
Overall product operating smoothness
If you can tell me which manufacturer and model of car you are referring too, that would be great.
I have a set of the Athearn Maxi Well cars and they run really good… My only complaint is I have on that leans a little to the side due to the pivot point on one of the cars. I have reamed it out and it has improved it some so a little tweeking and it should be fine. If you plan to run the well cars with other cars, either put them near the end or get some weight in the container cars because they are light and they will want to stringlining a curve when you get several cars behind them.
Are the base of the cars made out of plastic? Some, I do believe our cast metal frame, which adds weight to the lower mass of the car for better stability.
I have a 5 pack set of Maxi well cars from Athearn and when you are running empty they dont weigh enough and as said above they will straighten out a curve. I use them loaded all the time and there does not seem to be any problems. Also the trucks on mine were really loose causing the leaning as also mentioned above.
Walthers makes a Huskey stack 48’ well car that is metal body and heavy enough to run great empty or full. You dont need to add any weight to the containers on these cars here. I dont think that they are produced any more so you will need to hit up your local E-bay or Amazon for your supplies.
Do you care about era or time period? Because this my limit what you run.
Intermountain/A-Line RTR Twin Stack:
I’ve got 3 Intermountain/A-Line RTR Twin Stack 5-car sets and they look pretty nice and operate well AFAIK. They are based on the original A-Line kits which have been around for quite a while so they may not be as fine as the latest tooled well cars from Athearn. Some of the wheel mounts were crooked on the early runs but were corrected later, and IMR would send replacement weights for remounting the wheel sets.
Walthers Gunderson 5-car articulated sets:
I have 3 of these built from the original Walthers kits. They look nice but don’t have etched metal walkways - but I think Plano makes 3rd party kids for those if you need to have finer detail. They operate very smoothly. The connector pins which connect each articulated car to the next are a bit fragile - I had one break in the box while in storage. don’t know how.
Athearn Maxi Stack kit 5-car sets are nice but again, no etched metal walkways in the kit form. Light weight so you would have to add weight to the containers.
I only model stack operations between 1988 and 1991 so the some of the newer cars aren’t approprate for me and I never bought them.
Era doesn’t matter, as I"m using very modern locomotive power, so anything current and in the past would work just fine.
Do most of the older trucks come with plastic wheels? I always change out plastic wheels with intermountain wheel sets, which run smoother and keep track much cleaner.
As for loose trucks, I always tweak them straight from the box, to either loosen them up or tighten them up.
As for weight, I would most likely always be running some type of load in them, so adding weights to the bottom of the first container wouldn’t be a problem.
Details are nice, so if I buying for the first time, I might as well get the ones with the more prototypical details.
Yes if you model today going back, you can probably have just about anything. Just the older well cars like the Twin Stacks and the Gunderson will be more weathered.
I have the 4 sets of the Intermountain maxi stack IV 3-car sets. The detail on them is very well done, and they perform pretty good, even when not loaded. They are all plastic.
I got a couple of red Sea Land Twin Stack sets and a yellow SP Trailer Train set because there are lots of pictures showing those on Rio Grande stack trains between 1988 and the early 1990’s. There are also alot of Gunderson TT sets too.
The Maxi-III 53’ domestic container wellcars by Kato, are some of the nicest intermodal equipment you can buy in HO- they lack the ‘see-through’ details of some of the others but have superb quality, are well-engineered and operate very smoothly without issues.
A drawback is that Kato only offered these in two roads: BNSF and TTX.
The Intermountain equivalent car is also well done and has more metal details added. They run very well and are available in several different roadnames.
Atlas has the new Thrall 3 -unit well cars coming later this year so those should be a huge hit.
THe Athearn Maxi I 40’ cars are very nice too but run a little light - if you have good trackwork, you’ll be okay, if not you may find these to be more ‘fidgity’.
I hadn’t kept up on the Maxi Stack IV from Intermountain. I’m aware that the Twin Stacks and Thrall well cars sets came from A-line. Did the Maxi Stacks also come from A-line? The look very similar to the Athearn Maxi’s
These are my Ahtearn Maxi 1’s. I have 2 sets of these. They run faultlessly, no wobble, no leaning. I weathered them as soon as i got them. They are nicley detailed with air pipes, etched walkways, and air pipes etc. I would buy more of these without hessitation.
I do have some older walthers, 53 foot wells, these are heavy die-cast but no where near as much detail and very basic.
I have messed around with a few double stack cars. In no particular order:
Athearn Maxi-3 (I think) and Husky-Stack (single unit). Light. OK detail for early 1990s, but newer ones have more. These were kits, so I put on Kadee couplers from the get-go. Need to have weighted containers in the bottom wells to stay on the tracks. I added IM wheels, but Athearn trucks are a bit wide for these wheels. I swapped for Atlas trucks on the coupler ends, less slop and they stay on the tracks.
Con-Cor Maxi-3. These came out about the same time as the Athearn. Seem to ride a bit high, but came with metal wheels and metal bottom plates. These can run without containers. Glued on coupler boxes, which I eventually drilled out after they failed a few times. Hard to find these days.
Walthers 48’ rib-side cars. Ok for when they came out, but dated now. These had a steel plate that got glued to the underside of the wells, causing shorts on uneven track, and when the glue failed. Walthers trucks take IM wheels well. These cars are low enough to rub on Atlas above-table switch machines, and don’t get run much as a result.
Walthers 53’ well cars. Not bad, fairly new tooling, metal bodies. Run well unloaded. Not as much separate detail as some of the other offerings, but less to break off.
On all of these, the handrails and grabs are doe in plastic, and break pretty easily. Hard to transport to shows, etc.
At the current time I have 1 Athearn 5-pack, a handful of the single units, 4 Con-Cor 5 packs, and 5 of the Walthers 53 footers. Nowhere near enough containers to fill them up, not even single stacking the fleet. (the containers sure got spendy quick…[tdn])
Yes, the weights provided were minimal (glued inside the ends) so these kit cars are on the light side so it would help to put weight in the bottom container(s). The kits have nice paint and printing but need metal wheels and KD’s added to bring them up to snuff. This is SOP for a lot of older and kit cars and considering the approx $30-35 paid for the entire 5-unit set(s) they are still a bargain after the cost of metal wheels and KD’s. Yes, they don’t have the detail of todays RTR offerings but not the cost either. They work for me!
They may be dated but they look fine to me. If you weather them a bit the blend in quite well. Some didn’t like the steel plate you glue on the bottom so you loose the “see through” effect when they are empty. But if you run them with one or two layers of containers, then you don’t see this deficiency. I painted my weights black before gluing them on and they have never fallen off - I used a “goo” style glue, similar to Walthe
I just was noticing the topic is about “first time” purchase of well cars.
To the original poster - keep in mind some of the well cars mentioned will not be on hobby shop shelves as a rule because they were originally shipped in the 1990’s or early 2000’s. This would apply to the kit versions of the Athearn Max-stacks, Walthers Gunderson rib side and RTR Intermountain Twin Stack well cars. Those all represent well cars originally on the rails in the mid to late 1980’s and early 90’s, but many of them are still on the rails and in intermodal trains.
Newer RTR models by Athearn, KATO and Atlas are out which generally represent newer generation 53’ well cars that were introduced in the mid-1990’s or later. They will cost correspondingly higher.
The older well cars can be found at train shows and on Ebay so it is worth discussing them however.
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