I have been eyeballing one of these on Ebay for some time now and was wondering if any of you could give me your thoughts on this locomotive? The asking price doesn’t seen to high. Can any of you tell me of the quality of these engines?
Michael
Qualilty from AHM varied. I worked in a hobby shop part time in the '70s and the boss would always order ten locos from AHM. I asked why one day and this is what he said. With any ten AHM’s one will run fantastic, one will be an absolute dog, and the other eight somewhere in between. He would test them and keep the best five, and return those for replacement and reorder an additional five more. He would repeat the process, until he had ten fairly good locos to sell.
In addition to running problems, the older Rivarossi 4-6-2’s had deep flanges and should be avoided since they could not be used with high quality track and switches.
If you can see it run before you purchase it, then some of Rivarossi models can be used…
The quality was good for their time. Not quite as good as what we’ve got now, but still good.[:D] I’ve got an AHM/Rivarossi 0-6-0 switcher that ran OK when I got it. After some fine tuning, cleaning, oiling, and adding tender pickups, it’s one of my smoothest running steam engines.[:D] The 4-6-2 has the same mechanism, so it should also be an excellent runner, if you don’t mind fine tuning. I don’t know of anyone else who made a plastic heavy 4-6-2, so if you want one, Rivarossi is your only choice besides brass, or Mantua, who put in much less detail.