I am working to improve the rolling characteristic of my HW sleepers built from Branchline Trains kits. I have rebuilt the first ones I did to insure they were square and did not bind the wheels. I have modified the bolsters and cut the center sills to allow for an adequate truck swing. I run  these cars on the club layout which uses primarily PECO track and turnouts( code 83).

My next step is to replace the wheel sets that came with the kit.  I am considering Reboxx (.088). Any advise on this? Any suggestions?   Thanks for the ideas.

Finally thought I would share with you what I have been up to over the past year beside's helping a friend build his TH&B Railroad. These are the track plans that I have come up with for modeling the C&NW in 1989. The layout starts in Mitchell yard, heads East to St Francis then South down the Old Line to Oak Creek Wis. Most of this is plan is set in stone (sort Of). I'm up for some input and any type of improvements'. The plan is based on Fast Tracks switch's but I'm not sure About going that route, I'm really liking the Proto87 stuff they have.

Has anyone had to remove weight from a loco to allow fitting of a DCC sound decoder, speaker and/or KA capacitance device?  I'm wondering if anyone has tried using tungsten as a weighting material in place of lead; tungsten is less dangerous environmentally (or so I've read) and can be up to about 1.8 times the density (weighing up to 1.8 times as much as an equivalent amount of lead).  The Pinewood Derby guys sometimes use this stuff to weight their cars and it seems like something good for loco weights.

Now that I've managed my Labor Day goal of getting my track down (all 20 ft of it), I've discovered the wheels of my Bachman 44 tonner exude black gunk. After a just a couple of weeks on a shelf, it stalls randomly on shiny rails. It's particularly sensitive to track irregularities (nice of it to point those out), and starts up again with just a breath of a push, so it clearly has dead spots on the wheels.