Kato diesel locomotive wheel question.

[peteski]

I suspect  that (like it is the case with Kato passenger car wheesets) the new ones have same part number as the old ones. Kato probably considers this just a revision of the old part (not a new part).

Anyway, the low-profile narrow-tread wheelsets are an improvement over the older ones. I would just spend less than $10 and upgrade all the wheels on the older model.

[Vaderta]

Thankfully the wheels are still in good shape for now. Kato is local to me. Unfortunately with how frequent staff turnover is there unless you get lucky and get one of the installers to chime in, the people working the counter are not familiar with the older runs. Kato also doesn't seem to stock alot of parts for the older trains unless the parts carry over to the newer stuff. For example I needed trucks for a smooth side passenger car for a Great Northern Empire Builder. They don't have any parts listed. But found an Metra truck fit just fine. Hopefully they do more with their parts and to their credit the website update was helpful.

[nkalanaga]

For the passenger cars, I recently made a list of their replacement trucks.  For the smoothside cars, black trucks, the #800041 trucks were out of stock.  However, #800104, black Pullman trucks, look identical to me, and work just fine. 

#800101, black ACF trucks, are very close, differing only in almost invisible spring details, and I have seen both in pictures of GN passenger cars. 

Not surprising, as GN had cars built by both, and I suspect that the trucks didn't always stay with a particular car during shop visits.