Greetings,
I have purchase a set of the HO scale CA Zephyr cars from Broadway Limited Imports. They are beautiful looking cars. I have noticed that some of them roll very easy, a good push and they will roll a long ways. Others have a serious friction issue going on, acts like there are brakes on. The wheels don’t appear to be rubbing on anything. Have any on you experienced this? Were you able to resolve the problem?
Thanks in advance,
Mark
Mark,
Check out my write-up on tuning the CZ cars for better operation: http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/p/54626/2142322.aspx
It’s long, but should solve most of your issues.
It’s an odd fact of life that the more elaborate and expensive sets of passenger cars are, the more fine tuning and adjusting they need before they will run reliabily. At my club layout we’ve had guys literally sweat bricks trying to get their BLI streamliners to run while old Blue Box Athern passenger consists just glide around lap after lap without significant difficulty. Wheels need to be guaged, couplers adjusted, diaphrams prevented from hooking each other, trucks tuned for free rolling, just for starters. Good luck!
My first-run Cal Zephyrs don’t roll well either. The trucks looked tough to disassemble, so haven’t tuned them.
My Walthers cars have had fair to poor rolling, and, not caring about lighting, I replaced all the 6-wheel trucks with Branchlines, which are very good if assembled carefully. An average steam engine improved from four to seven Wathers HW cars before slipping on a 2.5% grade. Rapido has a four-wheel truck which could be a good substitute on the LW Walthers.
My Rapido cars always roll well, but my new Osgood-Bradleys had rotational binding problems at the rear and needed pruning. My five sets of MTH are good rollers and have been the closest to RTR out of the box.
Hal
I will admit it took a litttle time to go through my dozen or so CZ cars and get them all running well. People should keep in mind that the twin dynamics of demand for greater detail and RTR tend to clash a bit with passenger cars. It’s usually a neat trick to get them to go around a 24" radius, right at the edge of the envelope. And depending on the exact underbody arrangement – remember you wanted all that detail?[;)] – there may be some adjusting involved. That’s just a fact of life and the physics of getting straight bodies to go around curves gracefully.
The only hard part of the process is adjusting the wheel gauge on the CZ trucks. THAT will leave you with some very sore fingers if you have more than a few to do. You do have to disassemble the car to properly remove the trucks by pushing on the kingpin from above, but the rest is pretty straighforward.
Once the tuning is done, the BLI CZ cars are really great runners, so grin and bear through the process. Because in the good ol’ days, you had to build each one and THEN still had to tune it. It may not quite be RTR, but try building one yourself and be thankful that some people, some where have the patience to build so many great cars for you.
There was a batch of the first run of CZ cars that had bad wheelsets (significantly out of gauge) from the factory. Since the wheelsets are glued together, regauging them was not an option. This is a known issue, according to BLI. I helped a friend get his cars in running order. We had to contact BLI and let them know how many trucks we needed, then it was a simple matter of snapping the old trucks off and snapping the new ones on. BLI sent us the trucks for free. Once that was accomplished, the cars ran fine except for tight curves (the tightest one on our club layout is ~27" radius). We discovered that the diaphragms on certain cars would bind. Once these were tweaked a bit, the cars ran with no problems.