Trucks by Delaware Valley Kits - Wood Beam Equalized

Delaware Valley Kits

passenger car

Wood Beam Equalized

roller

?

no

yes

brass

unpainted

not included

Cast-brass sideframes and sheet aluminum bolsters. The story behind these (and some of the other trucks) is that these were U.S. Hobbies-imported On3 trucks, converted to standard-gauge S-scale ones, by making new truck bolsters. This was done to provide appropriate trucks for the Kinsman express reefer and wood passenger car kits, as no other equalized trucks were available. However, the wheelbase was too small; the car kits were for post-1900 prototypes that should really have 8-foot wheelbase trucks which only became available later. The Bortz trucks are excellent, however, for passenger cars of the 1880s and 1890s. There were two generations of sideframes produced. The first had a nonfunctioning but real leaf spring soldered into the sideframe casting (see the first photo). The second had a revised one-piece casting that included the spring. Version #1 was assembled by screwing the bolster into a pre-tapped hole in the sideframe; on version #2 one had to thread a roughly-threaded pin cast on the sideframe and use a nut on the exposed surface of the bolster. Interestingly, the wheelbases are not the same; version #1 is 6'6" and version #2 is 6'4"; version #2 is also open where #1 had a filled-in area. It is possible that the importer used an altered version #1 sideframe to make the pattern for #2; hence the shrinkage. A modernday alternative to these trucks are the Bachmann On30 passenger truck sideframes, which are very similar. The Bachmann sideframes have slightly heavier beams, and the wheelbase scales out to 6'0".