Passenger Cars - MTH Railking v. Premier

Carl,  We run two K-Line 17" MUs(South Shore) with a repainted Rail King heavyweight baggage car in tow and it doesn't look bad at all.   When the Rail King line first offered a heavyweight baggage car (15"?) I had a box of them in green with gold Santa Fe lettering.  We'd run them in heavyweight passenger trains, fast mail trains and in express trains.  At 15 inches they passed for 60' baggage cars.  A tad narrow, but close enough for us.  John in Lansing, ILL

This isn't necessarily a Scale vs Traditional comparison. I agree with Rattler on using 15" head-end cars. Many were 60' cars. So, yes those are scale and should fit right in.

The Premier passenger cars @ 18" are closer to scale (~21"), but IMHO still "not quite scale". I have owned, and sold sets of both RailKing and Premier Passenger cars. The RailKing cars behind a scale E7 locomotive to my eye, just didn't look right. BUT the Premier cars behind a scale N&W J also, didn't look right. Both were running on 072 minimum curves.

A big deciding factor are the curves on your layout. If the curves are "tight" (less than 060), then the larger cars are the ones that look funny. On smaller layouts, the shorter cars actually look better. What you are looking at are gaps and overhang between cars. The tighter/smaller these two are, the more realistic they are going to look.

If the price is right, I'd say go ahead and buy the RailKing cars. If you don't like the way they look, it's real simple to sell them and buy something else.

Thanks for the help gentlemen. 

Due to space restraints, my curves hover around O60, with some a little tighter.