Price: $99.95 (nos. 42734 Hot Joe ‘n Dough food truck, 42736 green pickup truck) Min Curve: 16- or 21-inch E-Z Street curves Cmd Low: N/A Cnv Low: 20.3 smph High: 38.9 smph Drawbar pull: N/A
Features: Motor, assorted cargo load
Current production road names: Hot Joe ‘n Dough Food truck, ice cream delivery truck, delivery pickup truck in green or beige.
Fast-forward a couple of decades …
Originating as K-Line’s SuperStreets, today’s street system is designed for O scale motorized units or as part of a trolley or even urban railway system. After K-Line sank beneath the waves, Williams by Bachmann decided to keep the idea alive with the E-Z Street system. We have seen the continued production of street track, vehicles, new switches, and now, more vehicles for a greater variety of road traffic!
Now you can build a true city street system and populate it with a variety of old K-Line and new Williams vehicles, or even cobble together your own equipment using the guts of motorized units.
The arrival of these two vehicles is further proof of the commitment from Williams to what may be the most innovative way to bring your O gauge train town to life.
Opening the box
Previous entries in the vehicle line include a panel van in four business names and a sedan in six versions. What we received from the new batch are a Hot Joe ’n Dough food truck (lovingly thought of as a Roach Coach by yours truly), and a green delivery pickup with a load of freight in the cargo bed. Cool!
The trucks are well designed and have the generic, yet familiar look of trucks a few notches below the major auto brands – like maybe a DeSoto or a Studebaker. Details include silver-painted trim on the hood and grill, white headlights with silver trim, yellow-painted parking lights, and a chrome-looking add-on bumper. The door handles and fuel cap are cast in, but are accented silver.
The rear features a cast-in seam of a tailgate and two red-painted brake lights with silver trim. A chrome bumper brings up the rear.
In this case the food truck has a white-topped box, three sides of which are painted chrome with the design of a latch and the sort of texture that suggests an insulated compartment.
The green truck packs three crates, a bag, and a barrel. I presumed this was where the motor was placed and the cargo/load covered it. But the crate load for the green truck easily fell out when I turned it over, and there it was … a cargo bed! So there is opportunity for Williams to offer a variety of toppers or to make your own load to carry.
Knowing the green truck’s load came off, I tugged a bit on the food truck’s load; it was so tight, I decided to leave it in place.
Bumper-to-bumper the model is about 4½ inches long. Flipping the truck over you will see cast-in exhaust and drivetrain detailing as well as two power pickup rollers spaced about 3½ inches apart.
There is an interesting detail difference between the two trucks. Both trucks have the same wheels, but the food truck has “whitewalls” and the delivery has “regular” blackwall tires.
On the test track
We rigged a small E-Z Street loop for testing, and the model did just fine on both the wider (21-inch) and the tighter (16-inch) curves, and zoomed right along the straightaways.
My impression was that there might have been a bit more motor noise than I had anticipated, but it could also be that I tested it after the NW2 switcher, which has a sound unit that would camouflage its motor noise. Don’t worry; I’m not talking about paper shredder level noise.
Our low-speed average was 20.3 scale miles per hour, while the high-speed average was 38.9. I’m sure it is capable of a bit higher speed, but we didn’t want them to go airborne on our temporary streets setup.
Since there is no provision for pulling anything, we didn’t measure the drawbar pull.
I think it is safe to say that virtually everyone who buys one of these autos will try to run it on their O gauge railroad, not just the E-Z Street track. Be advised these trucks ride low enough for street trackage, but you may have some problems on regular O gauge track. We encountered some woes running through O gauge FasTrack switches on our test track.
The trucks always hit the rerailers. At high speed, they just ker-thunked, hesitated, and rolled on. At low speed the trucks simply stopped. They might clear other brands of track, but I’d check before buying one just in case you planned on making it a rail-only vehicle. Remember, these weren’t designed as track speeders, but street speeders!
I like these trucks and think Williams has a winner on its hands. The company can sell them with empty beds, but a tank on one for a fuel company or a lawn care service, or perhaps a pile of coal to deliver to the last home in town burning anthracite! The possibilities are endless.
See these vehicles at your Williams retailer or go to www.bachmanntrains to check them out. If you are running a SuperStreets or E-Z Streets layout, you’ll want one (or more) of them.
