Anyone switch out truck journals on Kato F's or Atlas GP30's?

[wcfn100]

One of the last (hopefully) frontiers I've been looking at for my CGW fleet is the truck journals.  I'm not sure about other roads, but the CGW had a mix of several different journals on both of these locomotives.

You can see what comes stock on the Kato F (the Atlas GP30 is the same).



I've identified three other journals from photographs that were used.  Two are in this picture on the front truck:



And the GP30:



There's a third journal that looks like just an extended cap over the stock one.

I guess the sloped box ones were from the FT days and couldn't have a speed recorder.

Anyone ever do any research on this? 

Jason

[daniel_leavitt2000]

Atlas, IM and at least SOME of the Kato side frames are interchangeable. I think you can salvage the speed recorders from the Atlas Dash -8C trucks

The speed recorders look the same on both engines pictured. So I'm not sure if you are referring to the standard bearing or the box journal in the last photo

[Andrew Hutchinson]

wcfn 100 wrote"There's a third journal that looks like just an extended cap over the stock one.

I guess the sloped box ones were from the FT days and couldn't have a speed recorder.

Anyone ever do any research on this?"



Jason, check out the GP30 parts catalog over on Fallenflags. There are some sections starting around page 17 of the truck document.

There's another sloped journal that is taller (has a bigger vertical plane below the angled portion) than the ones in your photos as well. It's on a lot of as-delivered FTs.

I recently completed the journal  CAM  to integrate these into my own work but haven't cut them yet. Hopefully this weekend. Initially they'll be resin pinned to brass. I'm pretty sure they'll fall off with out pinning.

I don't know what the best solution is regarding sticking separate journals onto engineering plastic. With the various Atlas/Kato/LL/Walthers offerings there is a limited amount of material left once the existing journals are faced back and unless you design in some retaining feature you're left with just adhesive holding things together. What happens when you take the truck apart? As good as the Kato type drives are they don't work well as a framework to hang accurate components off of. The snap together system is a hindrance in a lot of ways.

Andrew Hutchinson