Diecast freight cars

The Lionel pre war remake from ~1990 is diecast. Others including Williams has made them is brass as well. Not sure if they were available in other than Shell and Sunoco though.

Checking further in David Doyle's book there were quite a few versions made 1990-2000.

Pete

In 1998 Lionel had 6-26973 set of three Getty die cast tank cars and also 6-26977 set of three Sinclair die cast tankers. Then in 1999 there was a 6-26947 1 piece and 6-26981 2 piece Gulf die cast tank cars. I also believe there was a set of Allied Chemical die cast cars by Lionel. If you try, you should still be able to find some , I have found and  purchased all of the above within the last 2 or 3 years. Hope this helps, Good Luck, Casey.

MTH made them as well, they had a complete set of dicast cars at one time, I have a very nice Shell tanker that is all diecast as well as some K-line that are made out of Aluminium.

I too have the MTH Shell diecast tank car, a nice hefty piece. I love diecast cars, they have that "railroady" feel if there is such a word.

Me too.  I have three Lionel 715 tanks and one Williams repro.  The MTH repro came in and out of here in a hurry - no comparison.

I do like the K-Line hoppers - to me they look like an almost exact repro of the 716, except for bolsters and trucks.  I have heard that there are slight dimensional differences.

Regarding those hopper cars, I have a couple of them but I rarely use them.  They are so heavy that they affect the length of the train.  I really have no problem with regular plastic cars on trains of up to 30 cars. 

The one exception is that behind my MTH box-cabs, I always run a die cast hopper car.  Those box cabs are so long and so rigid that they can pull lighter cars off the track on any curves less than 72".   The heavy die cast hopper pretty much eliminates this problem.  The box cabs are about the strongest engines I have, anyway.

Paul Fischer

Paul, I had the same issue with my Big Boy, but the add on Tender has taken Point of Pride there now. I was always getting a stringline on the tight switches if I had a light car right behind the tender. No more troubles now, but I had to shorten the max consist by one car to comp the length of the tender.

My max on the layout is now 58 cars behind the Big Boy not counting the Aux Tender.

I believe the scale Lionel tank cars had stamped steel or brass bodies with die cast frames & trucks. Complete die cast cars like the big 4-bay hoppers are quite heavy.

I don't think that is true.  The tank and hopper were die cast, the caboose was magnesium I think, and the boxcar was bakelite or some early simila plastic. Some say they made a stock car as well, but I have never seen one.