Rapido Trains - New GP20

[BCR 570]

I received my twelve replacement cars from Rapido Trains today.  I had asked them to hold off sending them until my return from the UK.

The replacements are much better; no shifted weights or dislodged ends, and no loose parts save for one end walkway.  There are some wonky end handrails and wobbly personnel and manway guards so I will have to see if anything can be done about those.  I also want to find some finer looking 36" low profile wheels, so will see what the local hobby shop has.

Thanks to Rapido for replacing my cars.


Tim

[BCR 570]

I have now spent some time going over these new models carefully.  here is what I found:
- The cars roll very well on their supplied wheels but less so through Atlas Code 55 turnouts.
- The supplied wheels have a heavy rim and are almost consistently out of gauge (too narrow).
- The supplied couplers are body mounted but work very well; no issues.
- The trip pins were sometimes too low and had to be adjusted upwards on a few cars.
- Many parts are not straight (e.g. personnel guards, brake equipment, manway railings).
- The end handrails are often crooked (not inserted sufficiently at one end).
- The graphics are printed well and are nice and straight.

Overall, very nice cars which have been let down a bit due to poor quality control during assembly.  As for the wavy guards and railings, I pointed that out to them during the pre-production sample phase . . . . .


Following Bryan's lead, I replaced the wheels with 36" low profile metal wheels to fix the gauge issue and improve the appearance.  My LHS had a healthy stock of Athearn 36" metal wheels so that is what I went with, and they look and roll very well.  I also added a safety placard each side for a splash of colour.  I am adding three NCTX cars to my fleet, and nine of the Procor cars which I have yet to go through.  These will represent the petroleum traffic from the refinery at Taylor on the Fort St. John Subdivision.




Tim

[Joetrain59]

My replacements are on the way. Now that I have new prescription lenses for eyeglasses, I can get back to working on trains. We'll see what comes in next week from Rapido.
 As for the color of the cars, they are 50 shades of black to grey. I see them almost daily on the Housatonic RR in western CT.
 Joe D

 I got mine the other day. Still some wiggly piping, but better than before. Perhaps Rapido should've used flexible plastic, such as in handrails. All other defects corrected.
 Will think twice about buying Rapido products again.

[John]

A lot of these quality issues started in 2020 - I suspect the pandemic played a big role...

Using the Pandemic as root cause is a red herring .. this has been happening for some time -- its just gotten more obvious as "customer support" is being outsourced to the end users and online forums  -- look at how long we have complained about Atlas C55 turnouts failing because of mystery metal -- and the end result is some are now hand laying, switching to Peco, etc ..