I love the looks of my Walthers Passenger cars, but they won’t stay on the rails. I’m pretty sure it’s not my track, I regularly run 40-car freights that include 86 foot hi-cubes without any trouble. I have tried loosening the screws on the bolsters, that didn’t help. I thought about loosening up the truck sideframe screws, but that seems to be a bad idea, given a quick “bench-test”. (ruins the geometry of the axle points in the journals). Any ideas would be great. Could it be the diaphragms? I hope not, those are the best points of those cars. Has anyone tried swapping out the trucks? Please, I am at wits-end here. Any advice on this?
Luckily I had no real problems with the 12 I own, except for 1 car.
Check the coupler can swing freely
Check the contact screws on top of the trucks. See if they are rough. If they are, file then down a little. Sometimes a rough head will get stuck on the pads beneath
Had the same problem with mine. may seem a bit radical but I completly disasembled the trucks and put them back together again.(thats all I did nothing else.) and have had no more trouble since. I think what I did may have taken the factory tightness out which has let them move more freely. I can back them though #6 crossovers and round 28" curves with no problems now. hope that helps
Are they derailing all over the place, or at a few isolated spots? It may be a combination of exceptionally fussy cars and slightly imperfect trackwork. I had “perfect” trackwork until I bought my first steam engine, and then I had to rip up a couple of sections just for that one. Then, I had to do it again for the next fussy steamer.
Run the cars very slowly over a typical trouble spot. Watch the wheels, and see where they start to ride up and “climb over” the rails. They may not completely derail at low speed, but chances are you’ll see a wheel start to leave the railhead. Check the track at that point and make sure it’s level. You may even get away with shimming the outer rail up a bit to keep the wheels from going over the top.
Recently I pulled out a few Walther’s passenger cars (ATSF Super Chief & IC) to use as test vehicles on my under construction HO layout. The 11x15 layout has a 2 percent incline down to lower level staging tracks, and that is the area currently being tested. Minimum radius on this incline & lower level is 26".
Well, while freight cars with Intermountain wheelsets just “flew” down the incline, the Walthers cars would barely move, and you could stop them anywhere on the incline and they would stay put. Folks on this Forum advised me that the axles needed a bit of oil (not needed on any other cars in my fleet), and sure enough, that made a difference.
Regarding your derailment problem, I would make certain that the radius where they occur truly is the 26 or 27". It is possible when laying a curve with flextrack that small portions have a much different radii than others or the overall curve.
As other posters indicated, check for free movement of the couplers and trucks. And when all else fails, identify exactly where the derailment occurs and recheck track gauge and move the string of cars with your 0-5-0 switcher slowly thru the problem area. Look closely, and the problem may be evident.
I have 29 of these cars, and only a few have been tested. So it is very possible I’ll have a problem with the others when I get them on the layout. Soooo, I am very interested in all the possible solutions that folks post here.
To add one more twist to what others have said here, on certain cars, the brake hangers on the ends of the trucks catch on the skirting on the car. In particular, the PS diner did that for me. All the other cars would make it around a 27" curve on the local club layout, but that one would derail every time it went around a curve that was less than 32". A little shaving on the inside of the skirting solved the problem.
I was using my Walthers commuter bi levels, never actually run on a layout, to test some intricate crossovers and was baffled by the constant derailing of two of the five cars. Since it was only some of the cars I figured that meant the trackwork was not fundamentally the problem (which did not prevent me from doing plenty of futile tinkering with the track of course).
I cannot swear as to the construction of all Walthers passenger cars but on the bilevels there is thin metal, almost a silvery foil, where the trucks meet the car body. The foil was somewhat distorted. I pushed the foil flat against the body using a cotton swab. Once that foil was smoothed out, the two derailing cars ran as well as the others did. I am not sure of the purpose of the foil but perhaps it relates to the optional lighting that can be added to the cars.
I assume some casualness during assembly of the car resulted in the foil becoming distorted. It is so thin that it does distort easily.
I’m assuming you ar refferring to the metal pickups for the lighting sets? I’d just go ahead and take them out, especially if you aren’t gonna light, or use one of the battery light options sucha s Rapido instead
I had enough problems with Walthers PX cars derailing and/or moving very slowly that I swapped most OE wheelsets out for 36" Intermountains. Much better after that. Money investment and time consuming with unscrewing the trucks and getting them back together, but worth it I think.
And the Walthers 36" metal wheels didn’t go to waste. I found them good replacements for OE @33" IHC and Rivarossi HW Px car plastic wheelsets. Also made the cars’ replacement McHenry couplers ride higher for better coupling.
A few of mine would often derail at random spots. On close inspection of the offending cars, I noticed that the trucks were twisted as well as the bolster screw too tight not allowing proper front to rear movement. All other cars were checked and found that many others had the same problem with the skewed/ twised truck. These were also the ones that had some of the screws not seated or cocked.
Do remember to oil the journals on the wheelsets. Many complain about the poor rolling quality. This improves them immensly.
Those metal tabs for the pu need to remain as already noted. I did however have to flaten a few that were not placed/ seated right.
A couple of things on the earlier release Walther’s passenger cars:
The diaphragms have a metal spring attached to the inside of the car that I have dealt with because of them causing de-railments (the newer cars have plastic springs that are a part of the diaphragm that are a lot less rigid).
Check the guage of the wheels. A few of the earlier cars came with wheels that were out of guage.
As mentioned several times before, the pickups for the lighting can play hell. The cars just aren’t heavy enough, and those pickups can cause the cars to de-rail on tighter radii. I just depressed the ones on an offending car, and that fixed it right up.
I haven’t had a lot of problems with my Walthers passenger cars, and I’ve got enough to make up 3 trains, one streamline, one Pullman Standard and another a ‘mix’.
But I will say, that what problems I’ve had, tend to come from several different sources. On one, the contact screws on the tops of the trucks were ragged and kept catching on the lighting pickups on the bottom of the car. I filed the screw-tops down a little and no problem. On another, the brake hangars were catching on the skirting. Filed the inside of the skirting, no problem. On two others, the trucks were too tight.
So there seems to not be one PARTICULAR problem with derailing on these cars, when they do, it can often be due to several factors. My advice: Inspect the cars carefully before you start running them. They’re fine cars, but they DO need ‘tweaking’.
One thing I do recommend, though, and right at first–replace the couplers with Kadees. The cars are simply too heavy for the couplers supplied by the mfgr., and the thinner plastic shanks tend to droop alarmingly. And follow the mfgr’s recommendation for the trucks–they are metal to metal and they do need lubrication. Either very light oil or graphite. Believe me, it makes all the difference in the world as to rolling capability.
Todd, I have two set of Walthers hvywts, and found several things helped me. Derailments can be because the diaphragms aren’t installed well, and will not collapse flat against the doorframe when under pressure on curves, especially sharper than 36" radius. Inspect six wheel trucks on a flat surface to make sure all six wheels touch. If so and your track is flat, no problem there. As far as bolster screw tightness, I make sure there is some angle play in both fore-aft and side-to-side.
In the end, I didn’t like the rolling characteristics of Walthers six-wheel trucks, and although I could make some improvement, the wheels would not spin for six-ten seconds, which is my criterion. I decided to swap them for Branchline trucks, which have special bearings. Now the Walthers roll like Blueprint cars. Easy swap, too.
I reread all the posts here and have to make another comment…
It is fully understandable that the end user (us) will occasionally run into a problem with a newly purchased ready built car or loco. But the frequency and variation of the problems noted with the Walther’s passenger cars - in this and several previous Forum postings - is just unacceptable.
As I wrote earlier, I have 29 of the cars, and admire them a lot. But I paid “good money” for them, and expect them to run easily without derailments on well laid track. Unfortunately, all were in need of lubrication (not a major problem), and still, about 15 percent (5) were in need of various adjustments.
A very legitimate point, and I hope Walthers is listening, but for those of us who remember when the ultimate in expensive ready to run was the brass steam locomotive, well, those things always needed tinkering before running so perhaps we veterans take in stride the problems with today’s Walthers plastic RTR.
I think maybe also in the Athearn era we became accustomed to thinking that kits should be a little cheaper than RTR and that in some way RTR is “premium priced” giving us a reason to expect commensurate quality. Is this really the case, however - quite apart from the fact that Walthers does not offer kit versions of the passenger cars?
I suspect that if Walthers tried to offer kit equivalents of these passenger cars that they would probably cost more than the RTR. That is, the presumably lesser market for kits, coupled with the higher supervisory quality control needed to make sure every part is in every box, as opposed to just plopping a finished car in a box, perhaps also larger size boxes, the need for inventory of parts to resolve consumer complaints, and LHS resistance to stocking kits, would make kits pricier. So comparing the reality of the RTR to the hypothetical of a kit version, it may well be that the RTR versions are in a sense the bargain versions with lower quality.
(It would be interesting to know what the assembly line workers, and their bosses, in China think they are assembling – do they really know that we purchasers expect to actually run these things in trains? Would they do better work if they understood what was ex