Converting K Line Passenger Cars Back to 3-Rail

You might be able to use Lionel trucks. They have the correct commonwealth style. I used a few pair to convert a pair of 2 Rail GGD ESE cars to 3 Rail. Might want to wait for Lionel’s half price sale.

Lionel truck on the left.

Pete

Thanks Pete.

That sounds like the easiest solution. Hopefully, I can get the same decent ride height out of them, too.

Not sure how K-Line trucks mount but if they have a separate mounting plate like the GGD cars it might just be a matter of drilling new holes. The trucks used on the 21” cars have no couplers but the ones used on the 18” cars do. Your choice if you want to keep the kadees or not. You can see from the pic above that the Lionel trucks don’t raise the car higher than GGD trucks do.

Pete

I’ll take some detailed photos when I get home from work today, but it looks like the original owner really did the work to get them to run on 2-Rail with giant plastic screws to mount the trucks to the frame.

I’ll definitely keep the Kadee couplers since the owner put a lot of work to mount them, and that was part of the reason I bought them since a lot of my stuff is becoming 3RS now.

K-Line passenger 3 rail trucks can be found on the secondary market.  What I really like about them is that the bolster plate is screwed to the side frames and depending on how you mount the plate (below the side frame screw holes or above them) you can adjust the ride height to match any number of ride heights on cars.  Of course, since your cars are K-Line already, you should have a fairly easy time of it.  It have removed the couplers from several of mine for 2 rail and 3RS use.  Not hard to do.

Another option is to simply replace the wheelsets with 3R ones as the trucks do disassemble fairly easily.  Here is on example of a K-Line truck I've used on a GGD P70 to make into a later P70Fbr.  I swapped the wheels for 36" GGD wheels.  Excuse the poor workmanship on the modeling.  It was a first attempt and like a lot of my projects needs to be revisited.

$850 is a great price for 7 cars.  I have 5 out of the set and finding some of the cars is not that easy!  Enjoy!

These are trucks used on Lionel’s 21” cars. The advantage is they already have the pickup rollers which otherwise is an extra expense and time waster.

https://www.lionelsupport.com/...OLL-NO-CPLR-SILVER_4

If you can find K-Line trucks, all the better. You can put a post in sell/trade forum looking to trade. Many two railers have 3 rail cars they want to convert to two rail. Could be a low cost option.

Pete

For what it's worth, I remember when those 21" K-Line cars first came out, and I purchased the full set of NYC Empire State Express cars. Another fellow in our modular group purchased ever Santa Fe 21" car available (a truly beautiful passenger train). However, it didn't take us both long to discover that K-Line had used way too small of a wire connecting the pick-up roller to the truck/carbody connection for the lights. Those too small of wires quickly burned out. One of the guys in our group came up with some VERY flexible Lionel motor connection wire, so I would up replacing all the pick-up connecting wires on my NYC cars and my buddies entire set of Santa Fe cars. Lots of fine work soldering.

Bottom line,,,,,,,,,,,be VERY careful with any K-Line 3-Rail passenger car truck you purchase, and closely inspect each & every pick-up wire.

Thanks for the advice, guys.

Jack, I did a little research and wouldn’t you know it? - there’s already a good chunk of posts warning about the pickup issue on K-Line passenger cars.

@GG1 4877 posted:

...snip... Excuse the poor workmanship on the modeling.  It was a first attempt and like a lot of my projects needs to be revisited.

...snip...

You are right, that observation is a little crude!

Just ordered the truck parts from Lionel. (Thank goodness for their half-off sale)

Hopefully mounting these new ones in won't be too much of a strenuous task.