Lionel Hiawatha 6-38094 Matching 18" Cars

I have the engine and 7 car set and it is gorgeous.  I highly recommend them.  The beaver tail observation car is truly unique.  They have the maroon trucks which are neat.    If you look up the detroit 3 railers a few meets ayour ran the entire set.  I believe the September omelet.

Thanks. Found the video on that website. I've seen a couple of youtube videos w/ them but would love to see them in person up close. How are the interiors?

The matching 18" streamliners you are considering have two advantages: 1) They are authentic steam-era streamlined cars, which your current set is not; and 2) They are the only cars you can buy that are a good paint match with your engine. I have that set; they are very good-looking cars. The colors are too bright and saturated compared to the prototype, but they match the locomotive and the set looks good together. They are the ribbed cars, which were built to go with the 1939 F7 4-6-4 Baltic rather than the original Hiawatha Atlantics, but the railroad did run those cars behind the 4-4-2's. As you are probably aware, the 15" Hiawatha streamliners with the Skytop observation are modeled after 1948 cars that were built to run behind diesels. They probably ran behind steam occasionally when the diesels were down for maintenance but it would not have been a regular thing.

It's a very nice looking set and $850 is not unreasonable for all seven cars if they are in like new condition with original boxes and set boxes. Unfortunately, I don't have any photos of mine and they are currently buried under a pile of other trains. As I recall, the interiors are pretty good. They do suffer from the typical Lionel flaw of protruding window glass, but that is present on all or almost all recent production Lionel streamlined passenger cars, so either you ignore it or you don't buy Lionel passenger cars. Personally, I just ignore it; it's one flaw on an otherwise good-looking car. I don't think you will be disappointed if you decide to buy them. 

I have them all including the engine and they are beautiful. I was just running them tonight. If there is anything in particular you want a close of let me know and I will try to get a few pictures. Also all the lights are still working since new unlike the 2010 cars just released! If your running Ross # 6 switches the pick up roller spacing on the engine  may have stopping problems without relays on the switches.  I just go above Legacy speed step 16 and they go through fairly easily by coasting till power is resumed

Ok your comments are making me lean towards getting them. I found 1 picture of the beaver tail car that was large enough & high res enough to get a better sense of the quality & detail on it and it truly looks good.

Now that said here are some pictures my Lionel Hiawatha engine w/ the 15" Lionel Hiawatha cars and 2 of the 15" cars in detail to compare. These cars actually are a match when it comes to the paint of the Lionel Hiawatha and are shinny aluminum so they actually look quite good with the engine. The downsides are the windows & passengers, the car lighting is not as good as newer designs, not as much detail, no car end diaphragms. I have a set of 5 (baggage, 2 coach cars (one w/ station sounds), diner, and  sky top observation. Those of you w/ the 18" set how would you compare the 2 sets from these pictures? Big difference?

Again my intent is to basically only own this Hiawatha set because I just love the look & living in Milwaukee it's pretty neat to have a piece of "history" that me & my son can enjoy. I mention this because part of me is telling me that if I am planning on having this one train then perhaps I should go all the way and get the matching cars even though I already have the 15" ones and "don't need" the 18" set and the other side is telling me that the 15" are nice enough so I should stick w/ them & save the $850.

Tough!!!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent....4529118/PC080112.mp4

I have both sets and there is no comparison. The 15" set is a high-end traditional-style Lionel set. It is smaller in cross-section than scale cars. The 18" cars are scale in everything but length (true scale cars are 20-21") . They are intended to run with your locomotive, as they did on the prototype. There would be two reasons to run the smaller cars in preference to the larger: space and money. The longer cars do require wider curves (I'm guessing 0-54 but you can look it up on the Lionel website). If you have the room to run a train 12 feet long, it's going to be a lot more impresseive (not to mention authentic) than the smaller cars.

Lionel never actually made a proper locomotive to run with the 15" streamliners. They made a set of F3's at the same time, and showed them in the catalog with the passenger cars, but the F units were freight locomotives painted in a freight-only color scheme. Decent enough engines for the time, but passenger engines only by toy train standards. I've run my 15" cars with a Rail King Hiawatha 4-6-4 and an A-A set of K-Line F units. I like them for under the Christmas tree. 

Dear SW Hiawatha

Any pictures of 15inch cars and RK Steamer?

My plan is this exact set up.

Did you redo RK electronics?

Thanks for the info I never got those two passenger cars straight.

Steve

Sorry, no pictures of the RK Hiawatha with the Lionel cars. I last ran those under my Christmas tree before I moved to Arizona. I may have pictures somewhere, but I have no idea where they might be. I have not done anything with the Proto-1 electronics on the RK steamer, but I do have a QS-3000 board that I plan to install some time when I get around to it. It has a BCR in it and runs fine with the Proto-1, but I got a deal on a QS-3000 drop-in kit. 

Best I could do.

The Lionel Hiawatha 7-car set is not rare, but it can be hard to find on short notice. It seems to me that one comes up on eBay about once every month or two. I also seem to remember one for sale on the OGR sale board a couple of months ago. Sometimes you will also see individual items separately, especially the StationSounds diner. I got my set piecemeal on the secondary market. 

The Rail King Hiawatha is a nice semi-scale engine. Mine doesn't have a lot of miles on it, but it's been reliable so far. MTH made two versions: the original, with a choice of conventional or ProtoSound 1, and a later version with Proto-2 and DCS. There are plenty of the older version for sale at favorable prices; the newer one with Proto-2 is fairly hard to find.

MTH never made a proper set of cars to go with it. The Rail King set that came out with the original Hiawatha had generic fluted-side cars with a boat-tail observation. No resemblance whatsoever to any passenger cars ever owned by the Milwaukee Road, let alone steam Hiawatha cars. They did later come out with some nice 15" Rail King heavyweights that would look OK with the Hiawatha engine. 

The Lionel 15" streamliners are not a great match for the Hiawatha. The colors are nowhere close and the Lionel cars ride tall above the trucks, putting the stripe out of line with the tender. However, I didn't mind the difference running the combination under the Christmas tree. IMHO a lot of things are acceptable in a toy train environment that I would never put up with in a scale or hi-rail environment. 

Here's a photo of the RK Hiawatha with one of the Lionel cars. You can judge for yourself if you would consider it an acceptable combination. 

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We have the Hiawatha 4-4-2 and the 7 18" cars. It is a super set and runs great.

Stationsounds car is very cool. "All Aboard The Hiawatha"

It is actually my youngest sons. He loves the Hiawatha. He want's to ride the real train and I had to explain they were all scraped. Oh dear 

Nick 

Sounds like a good decision to me. You have a scale set that will be a pleasure to run. My Lionel Hiawatha is one of my better running Lionel engines - among other things, the first Lionel engine I ever owned that smoked decently. I have a lot of rivet-counter quibbles with both the locomotive and the cars, but it's a good-looking, good running mostly-scale train. 

You're probably just as well off selling your 15" Lionel cars. They still bring a half-decent price, and there's really no locomotive that goes well with them. The best match is probably a set of orange and maroon K-Line or Lionel F-units, run without the B unit. But even there it's not a great match because the cars are high-gloss and the engines are matte or satin. 

Enjoy! That's what it's about.

Yes now that I made my mind & told the seller I'm stoked and think it was the right decision to pair the high end passenger cars w/ the engine. Too bad there's no good match for the 15" cars because I like them too. The other engine I would add would be the MTH Hiawatha (Premier or RK version (especially if they remake it in imperial)).