Spent the day testing running my latest acquisition a set of Streamlined Bud cars. Could not believe how many of the couplers on the cars were unsuable.
For some reason most of the jaw (opening part) of the couplers was jammed open, appears the jaw pieces were put on backwards. Out of six cars four cars had factory defective couplers, I replaced these with the old stand by Kadee #5’s,
When I tried running the cars again the remaining Walthers couplers kept opening so ended up replacing all of the couplers.
A couple of the cars were prone to derailing, checked the wheels and they were out of gauge, so replaced all of the wheels with Intermountain 36" wheels.
The cars now run properly. Just another case of poor quality control. Will think twice before I buy anymore Walthers passenger cars. And people thought Bachmann had poor quality control. The sets of Bachmann Heavyweights I have run great, did not need anywhere the work the Walthers car needed. Too bad they do not offer the newer Bud passenger cars.
I am really impressed with the new Con Cor mP54 HO cars, they are quite a step up from the old standby’s, the no frills equals to the old BB Athearns. Their new cars are very detailed, full interior detail and the factory lighting is compatible with DC/DDD. I would buy a couple of sets of these cars, unfortunately the road names I want are not available.
Based on the quality of the ConCor mP54 cars I have ordered a couple of sets of their new, soon to be released HO Branchline cars.
I hope you are informing Walthers of these problems and demanding some form of redress. They won’t know they have an issue unless they hear the complaints. I doubt if they visit these or other forums very much. Of course the cynic would say, why should they care? they also sell you those Kadee coupers and those Intermountain wheels.
There seems to be a recent epidemic of quality issues – other forum threads talk about rather serious performance and durability problems with Athearn, Fox Valley Models, and now Walthers. Probably not by coincidence, one now begins to hear of modest amounts of labor unrest in China over pay and working conditions. This was bound to happen.
It might be that the era of low prices combined with good quality from China is drawing to a close. For a time there it almost seemed like “you get what you pay for” was turned on its head and you got more than you paid for. Over time these things have a way of evening out.
That is why some once-famous name appliances now made in Mexico have entirely lost their awesome reputation for quality and are now just another cheap brand indistinguishable from any other. We do not want Walthers, Athearn or any of our other old reliables to go that route through neglect.
Oh great, I just purchased 9 hoppers from Walthers and havent taken them out of the boxes yet. I think I need to give them a good inspection before I run them. It seems like if it’s not one company, it’s another with this quality control issue lately. Hopefully the same guy that installed your cuplers at the factory had been fired by the time mine were assembled. LOL. Thanks for the heads up.
It’s a sad commentary on the quality issues of any manufacturing company.
The quality control issues in China are sometimes left to be desired. ANd they often don’t care. THey see to have an attitude of “dump it on the americans-they will buy it cheap anyway we make it”- hence the issues with cheap lead paint showing up in kiddy toys and such.
Bachmann is the brunt of jokes about bad train supplies, yet sometimes they are better than the more expensive and “better grade” products. Also Bachmann apparently has a fantastic record at repairing under warrantee or even out of warrantee or replacing altogether with a new train item.
Con Cor is also noted as being cheap, yet they are definitely often highly sought after as they make products others don’t like to make.
I hope your modifications last you well and I agree you should at least report your problems to Walthers, compensation for it or not, as If it’s not reported, they won’t know of any QC issues at the end user consumer end.
Don - I don’t think you should single out Walthers. Their couplers (McHenries) are not any worse, for the most part, than the cheapos that most companies use. After all, nobody but Kadee puts #5’s on their cars, and Kadee’s cars are priced out of reach for most of us.
I’ve had to replace all the couplers on just about any commercial offering - including all Athearn, Accurail, etc - even Genesis - with Kadee couplers, for a number of years now. Many cars (most?) also need the plastic or delrin wheels replaced with metal wheels, just to run and track reliably. These steps are just part of the hobby, I would think.
Walthers cars also have, unfortunately, very, very poor height stability. Their centerbeams and side-opening boxcars are beautiful, but the couplers almost all bob up and down, with the result that they cannot stay coupled for just one or two runs around our modular club layout, with or without level track. I have a few centerbeams I got at a show from a gentleman who installed firm-height #5’s, and they stay coupled, period. ALL the other centerbeams are not suitable without coupler replacement - due to bobbing heights as much as the p-poor brand x couplers.
I don’t know, of course, but I’d suspect the new branchline and other cars will need similar ‘tuneups’ for long-time reliable running.
Your frustration is understandable, but you’ve been a forum member for a long while now and you already know that McHenry and “EZ” type couplers are junkers. Whenever I acquire a Walthers streamlined car, I now immediately toss the couplers with out batting an eyelash and bring out the Kadees. I learned my lesson when during an operating session at a club, two of my cars kept uncoupling from my version of the SCL Silver Star.
I have 17 Walthers Budd and Pullman Standard streamliners and all had the wheels within gauge out of the boxes. Perhaps you might have had a batch with out-of-gauge wheels that slipped through. But it’s not just Walthers. I’ve had to fix a couple of Athearn locomotives for a friend with out-of-gauge wheels.
Once past the basic mechanical tweaks, they’re good performing cars that look nice (especially after metalizing! [;)]
My newest Walthers passenger, a heavyweight, came with Walthers metal couplers, and they work fine. However, I removed the metal couplers and put them on a box car. All of my heavyweights have long shank Kadees (#36 or #16) installed directly to the bottom of the car. I tossed out the swinging coupler boxes.
Usually, I can correct out of guage wheelsets, but none of my Walthers heaveyweights have this problem.
For lubrication, I put a tiny puff of Labelle teflon lubricant in each journal box and get good results.
My Walthers Budd cars now have Kadee couplers. Some required adjustments to correct derailing problems.
Lastly, installing grab irons on the Budd cars was very troubling to me.
After various adjusting, I can operate a Walthers passenger train with locomotive at full throttle going in forward and in reverse. Curves are 30" miniumum and crossovers have #6 turnouts. Grades are 3% in some places.
Nice to see these new Proto-Max couplers are no better than the ones LL put on the P2K Locos before Walthers bought them. Same type of thing, the knuckles would jam open and you can;t fix them.
EVERY piece of motive power and rolling stock I aquired gets REAL Kadees applied. I haven;t found ANY of the knock-offs to be as rugged and reliable.
Having made about 30 of the walthers cars usable for operations there are a few things I noticed:
The root cause of the couplers staying open is the trip pin on top of the coupler catching on the bottom diaphragm area, just need to sand lightly the area where the coupler swings so the pin top wont catch
The plastic coupler is crap and you should replace them unless your running all plastic ones (plastic couples tend to stay together when ran with other plastic ones), the wheels need to be oiled lightly and the axles need to be checked for gauge.
Once you do those few things the walthers cars run like a dream.
This is really nothing new, back in the 1960’s when you bought an Athearn freight car if you wanted good performance you replaced the couplers with Kadee #5’s and also the wheelsets or the entire trucks. The biggest problem then was the only wheelsets worth having were also Kadee’s, at least now there are other options for the wheels if you desire.
Taking the phrase “Ready-to-Run” seriously is rather naive as there is basically nothing that is actually R-T-R except maybe the Kadee freight cars and even these work better with some graphite applied to the truck journals and the coupler boxes.
The manufacturers/importers have already been shown buy the buying habits of most of todays modelers that they don’t want to build kits for several reasons not the least of which is a lack of skill to assemble them so until things in this world become “perfect” these problems will probably not go away.
But look on the bright side, as the economic issues in China change and costs rise you may get the opportunity to actually build kits again as the R-T-R stuff will become too expensive and the phrase “plug n play” will revert back to “toys” and not to actual “models”.
This was my first set of Walthers passenger cars and as I indicated my last set. The only reason for buying that set was I needed Budd stainless steel for my version of the Canadian.
I have a number of Rivarossi Heavyweight sets, mainly the 60’ series and never had to replace so many items just to get the cars to run. Usually I do replace the coupler sets with Kadee’s, but I would normally get a few months service before the couplers would start to fail. That certainly was not the case today, the couplers were failing after a few minutes use. The 2% grade was just too much for the Walthers couplers that were not defective from the start.
By the way, there is one brand that does use kadee couplers from the start, Intermountain uses kadee’s on their EMD F series engines.
I have about ten different sets of Walthers cars. The plastic couplers (up until last year) always got swapped right away. The heavyweights have had their 6-wheel trucks replaced with Branchlines, which roll much better. But the 4-wheel with metal sideframes, although they can be improved by a Truck Tuner, are not great rollers. Both types were sometimes crooked, sometimes too tight or loose. I also decided the grabs were too much trouble.
My Rapido set had centerbeams warped near one end, resulting in that coupler pointing down and low. And they were plastic, odd length, so I replaced the boxes with KD 5 in KD boxes. Had to file a level flat surface at the warped end.
The Con-cors got metal wheels, truck tuning, lead weights, and fixed KD 5 boxes. The Bachmanns came with sloppy cantilever coupler swingers which were also replaced with KD 5 boxes.
The Fox Valley Hiawatha set had metal couplers, but which varied in height because the floor ends were free to flex up and down. Fix was to first paint and populate the cars, then apply drops of (removable) glue at the ends from the floor to the shell,
The MTH SP Daylight set was a surprise - it worked great out of the boxes. I changed the plastic couplers and oddball swing housings anyway, mounting the KD boxes in the close-spaced holes giving diaphragm contact.
So RTR is not the correct term for passenger cars generally, in my view. My answer to most questions seems to be “KD”.
RTR rolling stock used to come with X2F horn hook couplers. The “junkers” I buy still do. Most model railroaders replaced those as a matter of course.
Some rolling stock came pre-weighted. A lot of cheap plastic cars did not, and need weight to run right. Cars with weight (Tyco, Mantua and others) often advertised their weight as a feature.
Rivarossi and IHC cars had the impossibly deep flanges, with 31" diameter wheels instead of the correct 36" wheels. If you had code 70 track, the wheels had to be replaced. If you used 36" replacement wheels, coupler height was off, and the brake details rubbed on the wheels. I think a mint was made off of replacing trucks/wheels/couplers on those passenger cars.
Model Railroader used to have frequent articles on correct paint schemes, color matching, and so on. Then there were the articles on modifying available rolling stock to better match the desired prototype. Of co
You guys remember my recent fiasco with the new Walthers Bi-Level Autoracks. I ended up having to replace all the wheelsets as they just wouldn’t even roll properly.
I am OK with replacing all the couplers with Kadees, which I do now on all my rolling stock. But replacing wheelsets it’s just redicuouls at the prices they are demanding.
Why all the sudden we are having quality control issues with China products?
What will it take before these manufactures to bring production back to the US. We have to vote with our wallets. If we stop buying these poorly built train products they will eventually get the message.
btw, Intermountain and Exactrail now come with Kadees.
I don’t want to get this thread locked with a political statement, but the answer to your question is to vote with your ballot, not with your wallet. Keep putting members of the Party of No in Congress and jobs, factories, and production will continue to be exported to China.
Our country, and our government, need to gets its act together and return jobs, and the manufacturing process, back to the the good ole USA. Even if it costs a few bucks more to buy something made here, we will all be better off for it.
That’s the way it used to be when I was a kid growing up in the '50s. Buy good quality stuff Made in the USA and pay more, or buy junk Made in Korea or Made in Tawain and pay less.
Quality - it’s a cost issue. You can get good quality from China, but you need to have someone there to ride herd, and that costs money, eating into the labor savings. If you’re making a million cell phones, not so much, but when you ake a few thousand model trains, the cost of sendign that person over becomes a significant cost item.
RTR - perhaps the model railroad industry should borrow a term fromt he rc plane guys, and call it ARTR - Almost Ready To Run. RC planes have 4 levels - Ready to Fly, Almost Ready to Fly, Kit, and Scratchbuilt - so maybe we need to throw the extra one in there as well. Of course when you have no agreement on the use of a term like DCC Ready, I doubt you’d get anyone to agree to the ARTR.
I would like to see Walthers offer their cars with or without couplers and wheels as two separate choices. Every time I purchase a piece of rolling stock, I replace the couplers with Kadees and the wheels with Intermountain metal wheels. So, give me the choice of buying a car without couplers or wheels and I will install my own.
