Reinventing the Wheels

Wheels used on CMC/CMT cars have seen some changes over the years, and they are one of the best ways to identify the vintage of a car. Fred Mill started out using a small diameter, turned aluminum wheel. It was closer to "scale", but the small diameter caused derailment problems. One of the first things Charlie Wood changed when he bought the company in 1978 and renamed it CMT was to start using larger wheels, after he used up the old CMC stock. But the wheel available from suppliers at the time was the large tinplate wheel first used on the Lionel 10-series cars, but later also used and made by McCoy, Roberts Lines, and others. Unfortunately, this was going from one extreme to the other: CMT cars are smaller in scale than McCoy Roberts, or Forney cars, and the big wheels look huge and out of place.

We hope that "third time is a charm," and that we have finally struck the balance. The wheels used on our CMT-LLC cars are sized between the earlier too-small and too-large sizes. Our wheels are the size and profile of Lionel 500-series wheels. When we first began building these trains in the summer of 2017, we had a supply of tinplate 500-series wheels. So the earliest cars we built had these wheels, but the supply was quickly used up and no more were available in the quantity and price we needed. We have gone back to the CMC roots in using turned aluminum wheels, while keeping the 500-series wheel size. We think it is an ideal fit for these cars. We have matched these wheels to rust-free stainless-steel axles. And of course, all the freight cars use traditional CMC/CMT trucks.