Lionel UP 18" Passenger Cars

Always a challenge to get cars painted years apart to match. IIRC the trucks are different colors on some sets.

Gray or Silver?  (Or that might have been another set:-)

The City of LA trucks are gray.  The trucks on the City of Denver cars look gray in the catalog - I'm hoping someone has seen both side by side to know how close the colors match.

A few years later I have the same question. Has anyone made the comparison? I have my eyes on a four car set City of Denver but am not sure from pictures if they will go with City of LA.

Well, if it helps, my experience has been that both sets of these two trains have gray trucks. Problem is that Lionel made more than one version of these in 18" aluminum (although I think that most of them originally came from the same tooling that K-Line used), and depending on the actual set number and era modeled, gray or silver might have been used. But I don't think it would be a huge exercise to airbrush the truck side assemblies of whatever you get to match what you really want.

If you check around dealer sites that maintain archives, such as Graham's Trains, you can usually find an accurate photo of a particular set. On the eB auction site, sellers normally post photos of sets of this vintage, or you can ask them exactly what the color is.

P.S. I once had an 18" City of Denver StationSounds dining car and the announcements were train-specific.

The City of Denver cars are beautiful, the StationSounds diner does say City of Denver in the dialog. The trucks are dark gray. I added LED lighting and many more passengers, and the lighted rear drum head. 18 inch cars simply look better on my layout than the newer 21 inch cars. I can look up the boxes to determine what years they were made. Happy Railroading Everyone

How do these compare with the handsome UP set Lionel produced some years back with the Alco PA's and 5 or 6 cars?  They all had silver trucks I think. Were the cars 15" or 18".  Beautiful set!

@c.sam posted:

How do these compare with the handsome UP set Lionel produced some years back with the Alco PA's and 5 or 6 cars?  They all had silver trucks I think. Were the cars 15" or 18".  Beautiful set!

@c.sam, I believe the set you are referring to had 15" cars with scale sized Alcos, product #6-31712.

Beautiful cars; perhaps best 15" cars LIONEL offered.

For possible comparison, here is a short video of a NOS 31712 set I recently lucked into . As Carl mentioned, the cars are beautiful (there are 7 in the set). I haven’t had the opportunity to run the PA’s yet, so I pressed my VisionLine Big Boy into service for a test run.

https://ogrforum.com/...9#163884069740673929