K Line Boscov's Reading Crusader passenger cars on curves

Dave: That looks like the wheel has arcing/shorting somewhere. The spots look like slag from a weld. Check your turnouts good and see if the same spots are on the track anywhere. 

That's an ugly wheel, I agree with Rick, you have some serious welding going on there!

It appears that the ring terminal is broken.  Where is that red wire going?

pennsydave:

    Dan is correct. That truck is similar to the trucks on my K-Line 15" Hiawatha set. On the Hiawatha cars the red wire goes to the pickup roller seen in your photo. The red wire has a clip at its end that is fastened to a screw at one side of the roller base. The roller base has two small screws (also seen in your photo) that fasten it to the underside of the truck. The clip fastens to one of the two screws, the one that has a washer under it.

  Check to see where that red wire is going. I am not saying that the circuit for your Crusader is the same as for my Hiawatha, but check to where that red wire is going and let us know.

John

After checking wheel gauge, ok; cleaning off wheel flange, and running without the number one car, it was fine.  I finally noticed the front coupler bar  ‘swing’ was stiffer than others so i oiled the post it was mounted to.  The truck swivel movement was fine.  I also changed the coupler arm  to the rearmost position on the arm.  Now it tracks thru the 042 switch fine, ran it through 4 times at different speeds with no issues.   

There is a lot of left to right movement of the cars on 042 radius track and the car corners come within 1/16 in of each other.  I don't think these would ever handle an S curve!  Probably should have 072 curves ideally.

The ring with the red wire was ok.  

Thanks for all the help.  Even though I'm running a RailKing engine with the K Line cars it looks great as a consist.