"The HeavyWeights" By K-Line?

I have the Union Pacific set and they have the window/silhouette strips and the coaches do all seem to be the same body style.

I hope that helps.

Most of the cars in "The Heavyweights" boxes have silouettes. The later cars in the yellow and black boxes have interiors with figures.

Pete

I have two six-car sets of K-Line heavyweights -- the NYC and the Alton -- with interiors and figures.  They are very nicely done.  The body styles of the two sets are identical.

Some of the black box cars do have interiors. You simply have to check the individual cars or sets you plan to buy. The car bodies are all plastic. Some of the earliest cars had problems with disintegrating trucks due to zinc pest. I have a dozen or so of the ones with interiors and have not had this problem. 

K-Line made heavyweight cars in both 15" and 18" lengths. I think the 15" cars were added to the line after the change from the black boxes labeled "The Heavyweights" to the black and yellow window boxes, but I'm not dead sure of that. 

Thanks guys

The diner I have had the silhouette strips and no interior.

I'll be looking for an 18" car, Seaboard Air Line had 70' and 72' heavyweights so the 18" would fit right in.  Now that I know the coaches were built alike I can see if it matches up with or comes close to the window pattern of any of the Seaboard coaches.

The "Heavyweights" are an interesting chapter in the history of K-Line.

To finance production, K-Line co-oped with just over (1) dozen large hobby retailers, and they were the exclusive rights to sell the card during their initial release.

Several dealers had exclusive car sets made for them, including the Train Station (Lackawanna Limited), Collectible Trains (Texas and Pacific) and Boscov's (Reading).

The initial sets have window silhouettes, standard lighting, and we designed to run on 42" curves.  Starting in 1996, the cars were upgraded to include interiors, and streamlighting.  At some point the trucks were modified to allow for 031 operation.

The recall on the cars lead K-Line to stay open through the Christmas Holiday period in 1996 to address the issue.

The K-Line Collectors Guide goes into great details on these beautiful models.

Ken     

Cool stuff, thanks guys!  I wish I had been in O scale back in the 90s I would have driven across the state line and gone to K-Line's office (did they give tours?).

Michael, I'm not too concerned as I'll be putting Kadee couplers on them.  What concerns me more is running the 3 OK Engines aluminum cars I have, if all that metal ever got laid onto it's side across the tracks I wonder what kind of fireworks there would be?  Hopefully the circuit breakers would kick VERY quickly!

The K-Line heavyweight cars are very nice in appearance and color, however the first run may have truck assembly problems which means the sides just fall apart on the trucks and wheels short out the track when it happens. This zinc pest affected the K-Line interurban series as well, as I had to replace both truck assemblies on my interurbans.

Bob D, changing out the coupler still leaves you the K-Line truck(wheels and center roller pick-up) assembly, unless you change out the truck assembly at the same time.

Lee Fritz

In many ways, K-Line was way ahead of their competitors by producing a beautiful product at a very reasonable price. The good news is there is still a lot of product out there to be had.

Some of the early K-Line heavyweights had small gauge wiring for the lighting. I had the insulation melt on cars just siting on a powered siding. There were some other issues with the wiring of these cars also eg to restrictive at the trucks causing wire separation. 

Lee,

I did leave on the trucks on my diner and baggage car.  they seem fine, but I can't keep them from swiveling/flopping around when I pick them up to put them on the track.  I said I was going to design a "fix" for that but haven't gotten to it yet.

I have 2 sets of K-Line 2-rail 4-wheel trucks and see they also made 2-rail 6-wheeled trucks.  I replaced the 2-rail wheelsets with 3-rail wheels, can the wheelsets be swapped out on the 6-wheel trucks as well?

PTC, I agree.  I like the way they come apart easily so a person can mod them or paint them.  A lot of engineering went into the production of those car it seems.

Charlie, thanks!  While I'm figuring out a way to keep those trucks from swiveling so much maybe I'll swap to using LEDs and add a battery circuit.

The wheels should be able to be swapped out if they are the same size on the axle length and the wheel flange is about the same. I have the six wheel(3 axle) truck assemblies and they seem very delicate to do anything with so use caution when working on them.

Maybe you can find a flat washer to shim your truck assemblies to the frames better, an automotive washer might help you as you can get different thicknesses in the washers. Fuel injector washers might be better as they are very thin and can be stacked when using for model train applications, sometimes there are copper flat washers as well.

Lee Fritz