ho scale walthers trainline powered crane

csiguy

Member
hi all


the other day i was at my local hobby shop and saw he had a walthers ho scale powered american type crane in conrail scheme. the price seems reasonable. $40.00 dollars.


the question i have is does anyone have one of these and if so how do they run and how hard are they to put together. thanks very much for the advice.


todd
 

eightyeightfan1

Now I'm AMP'd
If your talking about Walthers powered "Burro" crane, I can only go by hearsay.
Except for the rigging, they are easy to put together. As far as running, don't expect the boom, winches and cab to move under power. These still need the "five finger assist". But it will roll on the rails under its own power. Which must be pretty cool.
let us know.......
 
I have one of these and it is great! It is a very nice model as it looks great and runs semi decent. The main problems are that it is very noisy, and it has somewhat poor electrical pickup. It only has two wheel pickup. Two on the front truck and two on the rear. When I get around to it I am going to add some connectors to give it four wheel pickup. That should help it to run smoother, either that or I might add a tender(?) and wire it up for pickup.

Another thing to be aware of is that it runs quite slowly, which is to be expected, but it can pull a couple of cars and is fun to run around the layout with. I haven't gotten the rigging hooked up yet as I want to install a decoder before I get it all together. The instructions seem to be pretty straight forward, but your patience always seems to run thin when it comes to rigging up something like this. :)

If I had to make the decision to buy one of these again, I would definitely go for it.
 

doctorwayne

Active Member
I have the unpowered version, so I can't comment on the running qualities. The prototypes weren't particularly fast. ;)
This is a fairly easy model to build, and the boom rigging isn't difficult if you follow the instructions. I added a few details to mine, to more closely match one at the steel plant where I worked, then made a boom idler car using a modified Athearn 50' flatcar. I added a wooden deck to the lowered flatcar and scratchbuilt removeable low sides.
2007-01-10_108.jpg


Wayne
 

csiguy

Member
thanks for the advice concerning the crane. just picked it up on monday. i paid $41.00 dollars for it so not sure if that was a good price or not. i started putting it together last night but am finding that stringing all the rigging is a bit of a challenge. but still looks like awsome. should look really cool on a layout. cant wait to run it. thanks again for all the advice you guys gave.


todd
 

csiguy

Member
well last week i decided to put my walthers powered crane together. putting the crane together itself was easy. however stringing all the rigging was a nightmare. it took myself and another friend of mine from the kiskijunction railroad two hours to string all the rigging together. was the most frustrating kits both of us had put together. it looks really cool though and runs fair. it will only pull a gondola and caboose. but if i had to do it again, i dont think i would.
 
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