I MISS K-Line

K line was very good. It is ashame they are gone. Now we only have MTH and lionel which are not close to that quality

I believe RMT is now making some of the former K-Line equipment, including the track.

My first ever O gauge engine is K-line: my Conrail GP38.  No sound or smoke, but it is scale, and the most detailed locomotive in my fleet (and the only diesel!).  The only modification I had to make to it was to replace the coupler centering springs.  The stock ones were way too stiff.  The Lionel replacements provide just enough compression to hold the assembly in place while still allowing ample flexibility.

I miss K-Line too.  I came back to the hobby just before they were exiting.  Picked up an Allegheny and a Mikado at blowout pricing.  That Mikado is an excellent runner and a great looking steamer.  Later, I purchased a B&A Tank Engine that I just love. Their passenger cars were and still are some of the best.

 

A K-Line operating milk car with slow and smooth unloading and extended vision caboose are favorite rolling stock of mine.  The cars just have a great feel to them when compared to others.  While I do not own a set, the Santa Fe F-units are amazingly beautiful.

K-Line was a great product line and I miss them because of the price mark on their products.

That said they are gone because of a lot of very bad business decisions made on their part. I don't wont to dig up old dirt but when your swimming in a sea of sharks it's not smart to be arrogant. Get back in the boat before you chum the waters brother!

 

In any case I do miss the Murray Kline family, the collectors club, the Toy fair outlet they had every year in New York and I miss them at York.

They have been gone for almost 10 years and the other mfgs. Still can't make passenger cars as well as k-line did. No matter the size, be it 15",18" or 21" the details were the same on all size. 

 

They were also the only one to offer a more detailed diesel. The others had to follow.

I fully agree about the quality of their passenger cars.

 

K=line came a long way from its start. I remember when their painting and lettering were primitive, but they got it right as time went on.

 

Bob C.

I miss them too.  Lucky enough to purchase their 21" passenger cars in Santa Fe, B&O, G, and NYC went they first come out. Nothing comes close to the price and detail after all these years. 

 

This is my favorite K-Line Engine, & it runs great & still on my layout.

   Click photo to enlarge

That switch is used when operating in a command control environment where there is constant voltage on the track that would overheat the smoke unit. Set it to DCC (DCS)/TMCC when using command control. The other position is for conventional operation, where voltage is always variable, and the car likely won't see 18-20 volts for any significant length of time.

 

---PCJ

hello guys and gals.....................

 

Was it Lionel that  killed K-line few years ago ?

 

Tiffany

K-Line's service department was second to none.  Sherman Cooper

would answer your questions within a few hours, knew his stuff. Good work and fast return of items. 

John in Lansing, Ill

It was a K-Line employee that killed K-Line.

 

Two of the best scale steamers I have are the K-Line AT&SF Berk and the Union Pacific Mike.

I'd have to say that I miss them as well.  I have a number of their cabooses, PRR 18" heavyweight passenger cars, and their H22 coal hoppers (diecast).  They also made a wide variety of accessories.  I have several 120F accessory transformers, lamp sets, and other items.

 

I liked them.  They pushed Lionel and MTH and it was good for us and the industry.  Too bad about the poor business decisions.

 

George

Some of my favorite beer reefers are K-Line. They had a reputation for excellent product at low pricing. To some extent, they may have been their own worse enemy. We can extol on what a great deal we may have gotten, but was this a case of the "great deals" killing the Golden Goose? 

 

Gilly

I thoroughly enjoy my K-Line products.   I too have the Amtrak F40PH.  What a great locomotive for the price. My K-Line C&O Mikado has had a tire change, but no other problems. The diner with music and smoke is also a big favorite.  I wished I had more construction oriented animated accessories. 

Did Lionel get all the K-Line tooling?

No. Sanda Kan (sp?) got the tooling and worked a two year deal with Lionel to do "K-Line by Lionel". At the two years the tooling go sold off to various other mfg's. RMT got some, as noted above, Bachmann got some, I think Atlas-O got some, and nobody seems to know where the K-Line trestle set, and a few other pieces, tooling ended up.

Tiffany, seldom does just one manufacture put another out of business. K-Line made mistakes and these mistakes cost them dearly. So you should not put the blame for the K-Line demise on Lionel or for that matter, any other firm.

 

Having said that, I agree that K-Line was way ahead of their time with quality and products advancements. To me, their passenger cars are in a class by themselves. Just look at their non-painted simulated polished stainless steel effect. Even today, these cars stand out above the rest.

 

And as David has said, it did not matter whether you purchased a 15" or 21" car. the quality was the same, excellent.

 

I sure miss them.

From what I remember, the tooling got sold off to a number of companies.  Lionel got some of the tooling (like the 2-truck shays), Atlas got some (the covered steel coil cars, I think), RMT got some, and perhaps others.

 

 

It was certainly part of the problem.  Just how much will be debated until the end of time.  With the speed at which they were developing new tooling (and this is a major expense that doesn't pay for itself for years), they didn't have the capital available to weather the lawsuit storm.  Their debt to Sanda Khan (I think) was pretty substantial and this lead to the short-lived K-Line by Lionel arrangement to help Sanda Khan recover some of that debt.

 

I got back into the hobby about a year before they folded.  I miss them because the added competition helps to keep the industry healthy, and the added variety was a real plus for the consumers.  Their wood-sided reefers were a pretty close match to Atlas', and their die-cast coal hoppers with real coal loads were fantastic.

 

Andy

 

It would appear that Lionel got all of the steam engine rights and for longer than two years. Besides the 2 truck shay mentioned Lionel also released the USRA Mikado and B&A type Berkshire all with Legacy. They also rereleased K-Line's semi scale NYC Hudson along with their 15" heavyweights. Then there were the PRR A-5 type 0-4-0s in conventional.

 

Pete

The two year deal was for the "K-Line by Lionel" production. Anything after that was part of the tooling break up/sell off deal.

 

 

Same here.....k-line was awesome, and I missed the boat.

 

I miss K-Line, too. When I was a kid in the 80's, I grew my freight roster because they had traditional sized cars in the fifteen dollar range. Today, I actively seek out scale cabeese from them, because they are full of detail and reasonably priced.

 

There's a really interesting Boscov's train set on an auction site right now that is very tempting, the Reading coal train. Point is you can find really cool K line stuff if you're searching!

 

It would be great to see one of those tank engines in Legacy, however.

I miss K-Line as well.  I have many of their products, and the higher end stuff is really well made!  K-Line did make some really cheap stuff as well, it reminds me of your MPC description.

 

The TMCC/DCC on-off switch is easy, it cuts down the power to the smoke unit for command operation so the smoke unit won't overheat and meld the plastic side and roof of the caboose.

I agree 100% Dave!

 

For the price point, you couldn't beat them.  Not to mention the value of what you received.

 

I missed the boat also, returned late to the hobby and K-Line was gone.  When I was younger, they weren't building scale items yet.  

 

Wish I had a lot more of the passenger cars....

 

And, I don't think we'll ever see these cars reproduced, at least the 21" cars.

Gentlemen,

   K-Line made great stuff, having lost both K-Line & Williams is definitely not good for our hobby, I love the K-line rolling stock and in fact I am in the process of purchasing some of their logging cars right now.  I did not know they made this set of logging cars until Mark e-mailed me a picture of them, they are exactly what I wanted to pull behind the new Legacy Shay, K-line made fantastic stuff, a major loss to our hobby, no doubt about it, and I do not care that K-Line made some foolish business mistakes, Lionel was dirty on this one also.  That is business however, you mess with the Bull you get hit with the Horn.

PCRR/Dave

Well, Williams is only sort of gone.

 

Competition and innovation!  I was not paying attention to the K-Line passenger cars

until after the implosion, and then went scampering to pick up certain ones that were

then being dumped on the internet.  Luckily, I got some...others I missed.  Williams,

first, and then K-Line introduced the two words above into a marketplace then of

complacency and repetition, in spite of the fact that Williams did a lot of "re-do's".

Was not K-Line the first to do, a prototypical much more common, two truck Shay,

rather than "the largest built", or whatever?  I am still waiting for a small, scale geared logger; would hope it would not be ignored like the Rich Yoder scale three rail 44 tonner and the MTH McKeen.  Someone above blames an employee? Has Greenberg or somebody done a history book on the true facts of K-Line?

How about the MTH Climax?

Yes it was. And a good portion of that was relating to the PowerChief 120 transformer. Put them into litigation, a settlement was agreed on, then for whatever reason K-Line pulled out of the settlement & folded.

 

 

I miss K-line too. It was the LIRR set they came out with that got me back into the hobby. All my K-line stuff is still running good today

Rob,

   You are absolutely correct, however you failed to mention who K-line was in litigation with, so I will, it was Lionel because K-line used engineering on their 120

transformer that might have been similar to Lionel's engineering.  The big dog went after K-line and eventually ended up owning their company.  A giant loss for our entire hobby.  I do believe Lionel had been looking for something like this for years, K-line

may have made a big mistake, but Lionel in a slick business move eliminated some serious competition, and that sir is business.  (K-line by Lionel)

I am another guy who misses K-Line & Williams badly, both darn decent companies in our hobby world.

All my K-Line stuff still runs perfectly today, kind of like Lionel in the old Tin Plate days.

PCRR/Dave

 

Largest missed opportunity in my years in the hobby: not purchasing the Hudson for the ridiculously low price they were originally sold at. My only regret on a (non) purchasing decision in the last 20 years.

Just a few notes:

 

Lionel got the tooling for the scale steam engines, or at least some of them. The recent-production Lima Berkshire and USRA Light Mikado are reworked K-Line engines, and the Heavy Mikado is the Light with a bigger boiler (as was the prototype). The Lionel engines are much better operationally, with Legacy electronics, better motors, and fan smoke units, but there was no need to improve on the detail, which was as good as all but the very best brass models. 

 

Ironically, the 120 watt Power Chief was a failure due to poor quality control in China. I returned one and would have returned the one I got in exchange if K-Line hadn't gone out of business, invalidating the warranty. The dealer, a big national outfit, told me he was getting return rates of 50% and above. GGG kindly taught me how to fix them; I am using one on my layout and there's another in the dead zone that probably needs a volume pot, whenever I get around to it. 

 

Sanda Kan and Bachmann are essentially the same - both are owned by a big Chinese toy maker named Kader. Bachmann has just started producing the single-unit version of the old K-Line spine cars, and it seems they may even have put the right trucks on them. Most of the K-Line ones either had Bettendorfs, which were die-cast and sprung but anachronous, or cheesy plastic roller bearing trucks. 

 

K-Line did great things with aluminum. In addition to the passenger cars, the aluminum tank cars and covered hoppers are some of the nicest freight cars around. The tooling for those hasn't surfaced; I wonder if Bachmann might reissue them. 

 

Most of the K-Line on the secondary market today isn't the nice stuff that we are all salivating over on this thread. K-Line made a huge amount of product on old Marx molds, and there's tons of it on the Bay, much of it at fire-sale prices. 

I really miss K-line as well. From their scale rolling stock(the reefers!), to their passenger cars and locos, the inherent value and quality is still so striking even in this day and age.

 

I had the opportunity to shake hands and express my appreciation to Mr. Kline at two long ago Cal Stewart meets. They always had a fairly bare bones display but oh my!... those High level Superliners just moving down the shadow rail track was enough to take your breath away.

 

Mr. Kline was a very genuine and personable guy and seemed very down to earth when meeting the public.

I really miss K-line!

 

John

 

 

Trainfun,

   I made the same stupid mistake!  It happens.

PCRR/Dave

I missed K-Line completely, was out of the hobby. From what I have heard it was a really good and innovative company, that had many fine products. It is a shame someone with deep pockets and vision could not have stepped up to save them. If they could have survived it would be very interesting to see what we had to choose from today. I am sure it would be even better than it is now for selection of products. The demise of K-Line may explain the more conservative approach to new tooling that the current manufacturers seem to be taking, which might be a very good step to insure their continued survival. Which in turn would be very good for all of us in O-Gauge (and also good for the manufacturers).

I have ended many a post here with "I miss K-line", so I have to jump in, a bit.

K-line made too many things at prices that were sometimes a little less than L or K.

3 lengths of aluminum cars? Uh, no - 15" for most, 18" OR 21" for the picky ones (I have those, ATSF, but wish that I had gone 15"/60ft); that's sufficient.

 

The legal issues (I am not an expert) certainly exacted a toll.

 

But they were innovative, had a different take and brought out some really nice stuff. 

I have the 4-6-6, the Hudson (2), a Mike, die-cast cars...and so on.

 

BUT - my continuing question (maybe it has been answered somewhere?) is one that

I surprisingly have not seen broached: who has the ownership and/or rights to the

excellent K-line NYC J1 Hudson? This loco's appearance is bragged about regularly

(excuse the U-shaped boiler issue for some), so it surprises me that there hasn't

been chanting in the streets over it.

 

Imagine Lionel re-issuing it with revised internals - a bigger motor in the right place.

But, Lionel did not offer the K-line Berks with improvements (and their ATSF/SP versions

are completely incorrect past the smokebox front), so I guess the Hudson re-issue

would matter only to me.

 

I realize that Lionel may not be able to do this, legally or otherwise, but I'd be there.