talking about good qaulity..

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

Hey everyone,

well I have been looking for a good qaulity loco and I think and feel like I found a good one. But I am worried about passanger cars. Who makes good quality ones? On locos, everyone said that “typically” more expensive locos make better locos. Is this true about cars?

[#wstupid]

2

Newer Rivarossi cars are pretty nice and come Ready to Run…IHC, Walthers, Branchline, Athearn (use to make them but are a pain to put the windows in)… Did I miss any of the simpler ones?? What type of loco did you decide on?? The Kato Amtrak or a different one?

Jeff

3

Well, this depends on what passenger cars you are looking for. IHC sells entire passenger car sets for not too much money. They arent the best quality, but they are OK. They only make older cars though. The new rivarossi are nice, like jeff said, I think they only make older one too. If you need passenger cars for a small radius than the athearn is worth looking at. They make “shorty” passenger cars. They are shorter than prototypical length but they can handle an 18 inch radius. If you are looking for the new stuff, walthers is my favorite. Very good quality, but pretty expensive. I paid about $25 per car on my superliner train.

4

okay, so about 25 to 30 bucks for a car is usually top of the line.

5

I Have some of the Rivarossi pasenger cars they seem pretty nice and are not to bad in price. I sold off allot of the Athearn that I had collected, these were ok models but were a pain to assemble, but were fair priced. Walthers and IHC have a huge assortment of different roads and are good quaulity cars.

6

Here is my take on the IHC cars. I have a couple of sets, they are good value especially when on sale ($79.00 for a set of 8 right now), but they have some shortcomings.

  1. They are not heavy enough. I added interiors from IHC when they had them on sale.
  2. Trucks are very cheap, with poor plastic wheelsets.
  3. Old style couplers, though McHenry makes a drop in replacement sprung knuckle.

I have not done it yet, but would want to replace the trucks and wheelsets and install light kits. By the time you have done all these upgrades you will have spent the same as a Walthers car, which are IMO far superior.

7

There are quite a few smaller manufacturers of quite detailed passenger car kits. Most require some skill to assemble, and probably some additional parts - depending on manufacturer, could be just couplers. Some kits are just body kits, needing underframes, trucks , couplers. Many to most of these kits will be quite accurate models of specific prototypes. Labelle is my personal favorite, but I model turn of the century.

yours in kit building
Fred Wright

8

About 25 years ago, IHC took over from AHM as the distributor for Rivarossi and a lot of people thought they were one and the same. Are the IHC passenger cars the same ones that used to be sold under the Rivarossi label. Looking at the Walthers catalog it seems that Rivarossi has a much smaller selection of passenger cars than they used to, especially the 1920s heavyweights.

9

Athearn cars seem to track better than Rivarossi. Rivarossi cars are a bit too light out of the box.

Walthers’ streamlined cars are awesome IMHO. If they had a few more painted for PC, I’d get more, hehe. Their Amfleet cars are pretty good too.

10

What scale are you in?

I ask because some manufacturers only work in certain scales.