Especially for any vendors out there, or anyone else who knows, does anyone currently make a 2-axle front and 3-axle rear truck C-liner loco? Or is this something I have to bash? And I guess most importantly for me, did ATSF have these?
Simple, No and No. Walthers makes C-Liners, but only the B-B. And Santa Fe had no C-Liners of any kind. :cat:
:thumbs_up: Thanks!!! :thumbs_up: Would you know where I can find a listing of who did? IIRC, I think it was mostly east-coast companies... but I have been known to be wrong. B-B means ?
A "B" truck is a two axle truck, a "C" truck is a 3 axle truck. I should add that a 3 axle truck with only two of the three axles powered is termed an "A-1-A" Louis Marre's book "Diesel locomotives: the first 50 years" lists the following roads as being buyers of "B-B" C-Liners: Milwaukee Road, NYC, PRR, CN, CP, and the following roads as buying "B-A1A" C-Liners: LIRR, NH, CN. Regards Ed
5-axle C-liner If I recall correctly, the five axle C-liner was a passenger locomotive. The three axle rear truck was necessary to carry the weight of a boiler for generating steam for the passenger cars. I don't recall if the frame was the same length as the four axle version.
The NYC also had a few of the B-A1A C-Liners. It is interesting how often this question comes up considering how uncommon was this particular locomotive. I wish LL-Walthers would just go ahead and produce this variant of the C-Liner. Same body, but the mechanism would require new tooling. A few people have kitbashed this locomotive, but it is a major modification - there really is no easy way to do it with readily available parts.
Strange that this subject should come up because I have a windy to spin. A model of this locomotive - B-A1A C-Liner - was produced by Atlas(???) way back when Custer was a cadet; it was one of their first N-Scale offerings. Only one of the trucks was powered, the A1A I believe To the best of my knowledge I have only encountered one of these in the flesh; someone had one displayed in the silent auction at either Seattle in 2004 or Cincinnati in 2005, I can't recall just which one at the moment. The seller had initiated a bid of $10.00 and when I first encountered it the bidding was already over $30.00. Don't know where the bidding was at when the auction closed but somebody sure wanted it. When they first came out I think they were selling for $19.95 Although an HO-Scaler in the late '60s early '70s - I would remain so for ten more years - when RMC published drawings of both the B-A1A and BB C-Liners my curiosity piqued and I laid the two drawings out to examine the feasibily of creating a BB B-Unit; as one of the other respondents to your post said modification would not have been an easy task and I wasn't going to invest $40.00 for two A-Units to find out if it could be done so I left it alone.
I saw one of those B-A1A C-liners in a store about 15 yrs ago. It was a used item that the store had on consignment. I believe that it was painted for UP. As a curiosity item... and maybe to just say "I own one"... I could have bought it since the owner was asking about $20.00 for it. Perhaps the UP paint scheme was the real reason I didn't go for it... I've disliked UP for a long time. It was quite a unique engine and in today's market... where unique or low production prototypelocos are in disfavor... that could be the only time we'll ever see one produced in plastic.
Here's a couple of links for the old Atlas release if anybody's interested: http://members.aol.com/dgosha/CLiners.html http://www.visi.com/~spookshow/fmc.html The Atlas/ Rivarossi B-A1A version of almost 40 years ago was not a particularly good mechanism (being kind here). The were/are a trainset loco that run at Mach 5 and would probably not be a serious candidate for layout operations in their stock configuration. They can be made to run fairly well though but I doubt they would pull much. In all fairness, I've never tried to see just what they would pull either. Only the front truck was powered as the can motor was mounted vertically and the truck was held on with a clip over a knob on the end of the worm gear. The pilot is mounted to and swings with the truck as well. The rear truck did the electrical pick-up duties. These are not particularly rare and can be had on eBay for $10-$15. I have a soft spot for the old Atlas locos and have had a lot of fun "resurrecting" a few of them for the nostalgia content. It reminds me just how far N scale has come. Sorry, I'm rambling again. As to the original question, Yes, LL/ Walthers makes a fine model.
