What are MTH or Lionel Sprung Trucks going for now Days?
FREDSTRAINS
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$30 to $35 a pair.
Bet your little plastic men can not tell the ride difference from a sprung and un-sprung truck! But maybe your wallet can.
Charlie
John is spot on with pricing. Sometimes with some careful shopping. You can get a free car on top of the sprung trucks you are buying. I get the benefit with the heft of diecast trucks. But as far as the spring action. Even though it seems kind of like they have suspension. It’s more of a way to assemble the truck with multiple pieces.
Sprung trucks can be more trouble than they are worth sometimes. I have had springs pop out than the trucks are a dud. High quality non sprung would be fine……if it’s good at 4 feet than it’s good.
PennCentralShops
Sprung trucks can be better-performing, but if the springs are too stiff, they are effectively rigid, of course. To be honest, I always felt that the old Weaver flexible plastic trucks were pretty slick and "sprung-like" - but the Weaver (plastic) couplers were just awful - not because of the plastic major parts, but because of the improper knuckle range of movement - and the plastic "spring".
The long fixed rigid truck on the latest Visionline Big Boy tender is the first case I have experienced where spring trucks would help it track better. I do have a big stretch of temporarily laid track so it could just be the track itself.
Basically, the tender rocks badly through certain sections where the track dips. This includes switch tracks and the double slip switch. I would love to convert to springs one day.
I've always treated spring freight trucks as cosmetic pieces, I can't imagine the springs bring much to the party. Sprung drivers on locomotives, OTOH, typically do improve running.
In my youth days with HO scale, I had (and still do) many cars with sprung trucks. I thought they needed to be compressed to look real, so I put Linotype lead bars cut to length on flat cars to see how much it would take to compress the springs. Needless to say, it takes a lot, makes a flat car sway back, and the loco did not like it either.
