You’re so young but we don’t discriminate.
CHUCK:
All too true. The ‘adapter’ is a piece of plastic to ‘correct’ that offset.
Rivarossi and IHC both use 32" wheels and ‘cheat’ on the trucks to raise the car.
The IHC trucks are good runners (all metal) and also preserve the height. All decent truck’s run $24+.
Body mounting the couplers with Kadee #38 and weights to 6.75oz improves tracking immeasurably (#36 for 22"r curves). The McHenry couplers are fair only if you keep the original (yuck!) trucks. The Rivarossi made cars are worth putting the $$ into. I used some IHC trucks, and changed the wheels in other’s to JB 36" wheels - and JB mounting pads for KD #36’s.
IHC was Rivarossi’s importer that lost theIr franchise, and made cheap Chinese copies to sell. They take more work. Keep in mind that the body is a piece of painted plastic - no more - and the wheel’s/truck do all the work. MY Rivarossi cars are now up to NMRA spec’s, look good and run as good as everything else.
At the end of the day - you have got to decide whether you want to run a representation of the daylight express or copy down to the last rivet!
The daylight is a real favourite of mine, and seeing as I cannot affort Brass I ahve settled for the Bachmann GS-4 or Proto E7 /E8 and a rake of Athearn blue box streamliners. Yep I know they are not like the real thing, but they give a good (relitivly inexpensive) representation of a daylight express consist.
I also have a few Spectrum daylight heavy weights and somelines chuck them in the rake as well to make the numbers up.
I had a rake of IHC smooth side streamliners and I sold them - they were just too plasticky - and you had to pay extra to convert them to take kadees.
If you want heavyweights in daylight colours you are stuck with the Spectrum coaches (which are not bad models) but if youw ant to go for something along the line of a ‘Lark’ rake there are no substitutes for the walthers heavyweights!
Rivarossi 60’s are also great - but you will only get SP versions in the Green livery - plus they are now out of production.
Hope that helps - if you can’tdecide get a few different rakes!
Regards,
Stephen.