Has This Ever Happened To You?


Keith 55

Member
My brother and his girlfriend picked out a Roundhouse RTR 40' 3-bay offset hopper to give to me as a present, in L&A paint. Very cool.
He tells me it already has MicroTrains' Bettendorf trucks on it, as purchased from the LHS.
(Hmm...the jewel case says "Rapido And The New MDC Knuckle Coupler".)
I take a peek and tell him that it has MT Archbar trucks, and that he's a chump for not swapping them out and keeping the archbars, because he needs them for his older era.
After I get home I look closer and it turns out that:
It has one of each!!
(Guess it never occured to either of us to look at BOTH trucks. Who puts 2 different kinds of trucks on the same car?)

Moral of this story: There is more 'used' rollingstock at your LHS than you think, and some of it wasn't 'used' very well.
 
Keith 55 said:
Who puts 2 different kinds of trucks on the same car?

This may have been someone's conversion car. I have done this for 2 of my cars. This way, I can slowly convert my rolling stock to MT, without shortening the length of the consist.

Essentially, my consist looks like my attached image....
(If that makes any sense at all)
 
Marc, they are both MT trucks/couplers, just 2 totally different sideframes.
(Archbar trucks were banned from interchange back around 1930, because they were bolted together rather than being a single casting, and the bolts would vibrate loose, so they would sometimes fall apart at speed.)
 
One truck may have been damaged and replaced with
the other just to keep the car running?
 



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