K-Line still knocks it out of the park...........Pics and video added

I too wish K-Line was still around. The scale products they were making at the end beat everyone else and not only in lower price, the quality was outstanding. Now we're back to the big two battling it out and flooding the market with duplicates of everything the other guy makes. It was better when it was the big three. LOL

I started almost an identical thread back when I got my K-Line NYC Pacemaker set. Indeed, K-Line continues to impress from beyond the grave.

https://ogrforum.com/t...-set?reply=lastReply

The situation you've run into is the only drawback to it all. K-Line often had its own colors they used on engines and passenger cars even if they were way off. Their Daylight cars for example are much more dark in shade than they're supposed to be, but it's a fair trade off as the only other 21" Daylight cars are an enormous price leap to Golden Gate Depot.

A set that would surely match your F-3s would be one of K-Line's own Milwaukee Road consists in either 18" or 21":

http://www.legacykline.com/apps/kl/catalog.html?useraction=road&p_road_name=Milwaukee+Road&p_oem_sku=K-4643D

http://www.legacykline.com/apps/kl/catalog.html?useraction=road&p_road_name=Milwaukee+Road&p_oem_sku=K-4643K

Paul

The K-Line F's are awesome.  Six motors can pull anything.  Watch out for the diaphgrams because they tend to rip as they are cloth and not rubber.  Seems there were some little problems with the tethers with these too.  Sometimes one of the engines loses its sync with the other two somehow.

The K-Line 21 inch cars are beautiful as Al Pacino mentioned but good luck trying to find them.  If you do they might be twice as much as the GGD cars which I don't believe made any Hiawatha cars.

yeah! K-line rocks!

Lucky you

How about some pictures.

I've been hesitant to purchase older K-line due to parts availability.  Is that an issue or misperception?

Thanks,

Sunrise

That is an issue as nobody is producing them.  You can find some on the second hand market.  Their steam engines were great but everyone of them I owned needed a new chuff switch

K-Line used Lionel electronics so they can be had from Lionel or 3rd parties like ERR.

For other parts you have to be creative and do some leg work like finding other manufacturers parts that will fit. Trucks and traction tires come to mind.

Pete

Couldn't agree more!  Some of my favorites were the scale-sized aluminum tankers.  10-12 years later and they still hold a candle to the stuff that Lionel and Atlas-O produce today with their tank car offerings. 

They also made some very unique novelty items as well.  I recently stumbled upon a series of 20-foot tank containers for intermodal cars.  These are essentially a fuel tank enclosed by a simulated metal cage, so the tanks could be stacked on intermodal flat cars.  They apparently go for $12-$15 dollars, but some of the ones that are tougher to locate now go for a premium.  A recent CN 20-ft tank container went for around $60-$70 with shipping on eBay.  Too bad today's importers don't offer these, as they make for an interesting change of pace for intermodal cargo on long trains.

David

David

MTH makes ISO tank containers, but they are not as nice as the K-Line ones. 

Try Brasseur Electric Trains.

To make a long story short, my graduation present to myself was a K-Line Titan Big Boy.  Got it for $100 less than MSRP on ebay.  It had only been opened for photos, so it was a new, never run locomotive.  And boy what a beauty! It'll pull everything I've got, until my CW-80 goes into roll back because I run out of current as I have a lot of passenger cars.  But with a short freight train it can crawl or fly.  Love the sound, but it's a poor smoker (What I hear is normal for TMCC locomotives of it's era.).  When I go to enlarge my steam collection, I'm sure to start looking for the other K-Line Titan locomotives to start with.

I hear Murry is running a UPS store in the Carolinas, I hope he is happy but I doubt it. Maybe he will get back in it someday hopefully.

As has been mentioned, K-Line made its own streamlined passenger cars, which are a perfect match for the Milwaukee Road F units. They also made 18" heavyweights with the same paint colors. The aluminum streamliners were made in 15" length in addition to the 18" and 21" ones already mentioned. The 21" cars generally change hands for $125-150 per car; the shorter ones somewhat less. The colors are darker then the prototype, but a good match for old photos of slightly weathered and dirty cars. GGD made heavyweights in maroon and orange but no streamliners. They are about as expensive and hard to find as the K-Line streamliners. They are also fragile and prone to  losing small detail parts. I recommend waiting until you can find a semi-reasonable deal on K-Line cars and then grab them - there's really no substitute. I picked up a set of four of the 18" cars a couple of months ago for about $300 - I figure I got lucky.

I have two sets of the earlier version of the Milwaukee F units - the one with six motors and no smoke units (one set is for sale on the Buy/Sell board). These have been excellent runners; I've never had a problem with them. On some examples of the late K-Line F units with smoke, there is an issue with the smoke units drawing too much current and blowing something on the board, causing the engine to stop running. A friend of mine had this problem with his SP set when it was new. K-Line replaced the electronics under warranty and advised him to leave the smoke units off. I don't know exactly what the problem was. My friend is not an electronics guy and I don't think K-Line told him specifically what they replaced. 

The Lionel 19184 set won't match. MTH made a set of these engines, and presumably those would have matched your cars. As you've found, the K-Line engines don't. As has been mentioned on the Forum many times, it is extremely rare to find a color match between manufacturers. Buying an engine from one manufacturer and expecting it to match cars of another is not realistic, for the most part. Matching a color like orange? - forget it. As indicated by others, nothing will match these K-Line engines except K-Line cars.

You'll probably need to spend a lot of dough to get enough K-Line passenger cars to look any good behind the 4 engines you got, unfortunately. But there's another option: pull freight!

Do the K-Line F  units have scale pilot detail?

The PRR models posted above appear to have a smooth pilot like Lionel Post War diesels as does this NYC E8 we used t have.

Sam, The smooth pilot is prototypical and generally referred to as the Passenger Pilot vs the Freight pilot. I believe they just applied sheet metal over the freight pilot to give the more streamlined appearance.

Pete

Thanks for the replies, I figured the K-Line cars would be the best match and have started to watch the auction sites for them. Anyone have any pictures of theirs?

i had issues with the two K-Line diesel sets i had, but, man, i love their passenger cars.  i run 15" cars and they made a bunch of those that were great.  

The "passenger pilot" is its own entity.  It is not a plated over "freight pilot."

Rusty

I love the K-Line products.  I have the Milwaukee Road 21" passenger cars and will post a photo later today.

K-Line did indeed produce some great looking stuff.  I have a lot of K-Line, some of my K-Line equipment...

Every York I pick up a K-Line engine or two. It always amazes me how much is still available new in box.  I have never had even the smallest disappointment in my K-Line engines and rolling stock. 

I have two sets of the F units in Milwaukee. Love them. I run K-line 15 inch cars with them. They also made longer versions. I really like the cars except the full dome looked squat because the dome was wide. I saw a MTH 15 inch dome car on E-bay and bought it. It's a very close match and looks much better than the K-line car. I bought a second MTH dome car as they are not high in price. Don 

One of my favorites were the woodside reefers. They gave Atlas a run for its money, plus you could remove the roofs to hang carcasses inside and put ice in the bunkers. Unfortunately, they only did single numbers on most of them. They announced a 4-car set of "Santa Fe Peaches" blue reefers (fantasy scheme as far as I can find so far), but I never saw them offered for sale.

They would still be around if folks back then hadn't been so personally self-absorbed that they kept demanding more and more for less and less money.  Of course, it was the firm's ultimate responsibility to keep things under control, which they quite obviously failed to do.  As a result, the hobby lost a manufacturer that was, for a time, producing some very fine products.  The moral of the story is that you can produce a high-quality, high-end product and sell it cheap, but you can't do that for long. 

ONE OF THE K-lINE BARGAINS WAS THE NEW HAVEN EP5.THE PRICE WAS RIDICULOUS. IT WAS IN TH NEIGHBORHOOD OF $125 .A PAL CONVERTED TO 2 RAIL FOR $125..WHEN I TOOK IT TO A TRAIN MEET EVEN THE GUYS WHO WERE NOT NEOPHYES THOUGHT IT WAS A BRASS IMPORT.

  THE HIAWATHA CARS WERE GREAT TO MY WAY OF THINKING.I HAD STARTED ON A SET OF WALTHERS CARS  BUT K LINES LOOKED BETTER TO ME AND I BOUGHT A SET OF THOSE. I REALIZE THAT THE SKYTOP LOUNGE DID NOT HAVE PRIMATIC GLASS  

BUT THE TRAIN LOOKED GOOD TO ME.  ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL TRAIN WAS THE 21" EMPIRE STATE EXPRESS PULLED BY AN MTH 2 RAIL EMPIRE STATE HUDSON. REMINDED ME OF RIDING THE EMPIRE FROM NEW YORK TO BUFFALO WHEN I WAS STATIONED AT COTP  NEW YORK

I really enjoy the 15 inch streamliners.  Attached is a photo showing several of them in my collection.

Lew Schneider

I love my K line"Fleet of Modernism" cars, my only complaint would be those small diameter rollers -VS- gaps in bad track, some turnouts, and crossovers. They can sometimes cause "pole vaulting" derailments.

Paul...I have the Milwaukee F-units like yours and they are beautiful!  I also have the 21" cars with an extra full dome....all the colors match perfectly.

Alan

Well, there was more to the story than that.

Of the thirty scale engines I run, 12 are K-line. Never had a problem with any of them. Don

K-Line made a superb collection of Ringling Bros. Circus Cars.  I have a large collection of them.  They remind me of a kindler gentler time in our society.  The club I belong too always looks forward to me running the circus train at the open houses.  The kids love it. 

The actual price paid for K-Line was lower because the discounts were much larger on K-line than they were on Lionel and MTH.

What will people say 10 years from now about paying 2013 prices for Third Rail, Atlas & Weaver engines with TMCC? 

I still miss K-Line, may Bob Grubba rest in some very hot place.

Gerry

"may Bob Grubba rest in some very hot place."

LMAO! Exactly!

I have the K-Line scale B&O F-3's and they are as good looking in detail as any, and under Legacy run very nice. One of my favorite and therefore lots of hours on it, is the B&O K-Line Scale Mikado that I upgraded to PS-2. Can't get much better detail on a steamer then that.

I kind of miss sparring with Maury D.  We sure butted heads a few times over the years! 

That never deterred me from buying K-Line product, though, and at one time I had some 60 or so K-Line engines and a lot of rolling stock.  All gone now though.

Wait a minute....Pete said he found a PRR B6 and upgraded it with Cruise M. Then Sam obtains a PRR B6 from Pete. Then it trades hands with someone I forgot now and I got it from that someone awhile back. Do I have Pete's B6 with Cruise M? Or was this just a duplicate in Pete's collection?

As a side note I'm surprised the extra Cruise goodies fit under that little boiler.

 Hmmm, isn't there a complaint post about Atlas right now along these lines?

Haha, indeed! Thanks for clearing that up Sam, for a moment I thought my B6 had an extra goody inside I never knew about