I am wondering about the Athearn Roundhouse ad in this months magazine. The picture shows a F7 which looks like an old Athearn blue box mold. The texts says they are bring back old Roundhouse models. Does this mean that they are going to start reproducing the old blue box kits and the old Roundhouse kits? I would love it if they did. While not the most detailed models with no bells and whistles, not working ones anyway, they were still fairly nice and you could quickly build a fleet of cars and locomotives because of their low price.
For people who don’t know history, back in the day Model Die Casting merged with Roundhouse. Athearn was their competitor. The Horizon Hobby bought them both out. Then they dumped both lines of kits in favor of ready to run models. SMH.
So my question is are they now bring back those kits?
They have been making the BB F7 as RTR and been making the majority of Roundhouse freight cars with upgrades like separate handrails, metal walk overs and metal wheels.
Looks like the RTR models will be sold under Athearn “Roundhouse” line.You will need to click on the “Roundhouse” name to see the Athearn(Roundhouse) logo.
Athearn is restructuring their branding. Just like Walthers and Atlas have seperated their products based on detail level/cost, that is what Athearn is doing.
The “Roundhouse” name will now appear on all the lessor detailed, and generic models that are mostly carryovers from both the old Athearn line and the earlier models from Roundhouse line.
The Athearn “Ready to Roll” line will now be the better detailed, mostly newer tooling Athearn and Roundhouse items that are not considered up to “Genesis” line detail standards, but are much better than the older models.
The Genesis line will remain the top tier detailed models.
Those who do not know should understand that depending on the era you model, a great number of the Athearn “Ready to Roll” items over the last 10 years or so are nothing more than Blue box kit cars with better paint jobs and metal wheels - those items will now be “Roundhouse” brand, regardless of the era of the prototype.
Kits - except for undecorated versions offered in some items, don’t hold your breath…
After the Athearn acquisition, they positioned Roundhouse as the older era stuff. Now they seem to be rolling modern items that are RTR into Roundhouse brand. I think it helps clarify the distinction between these productsand the upper end of RTR and then the genesis lines.
As for blue box making a comeback, on the cheap and at a profit – best 2 out of 3 is all you might get and I doubt that. This ad is certainly no indication of that. Too many of them still sitting around. The profit would defintely be less than RTR would be, And how many people will really want a boxcar that has the same roadnumber for the last several decades?
Mike,The sad thing is the blue box era is over and in the history books and will never return since the hobby has moved far beyond that.
Both the Roundhouse and Athearn cars has many detail flaws that will not be as acceptable today like it was (say) 20 years ago. Both brands of cars was a foot to wide and the Athearn 50’ boxcar(aka ACF or “Railbox”) was to short-around a foot.
The improve RTR Roundhouse FMC boxcar is far superior to their kit brethren with metal grabs,steps and crossover.
The older Athearn cars are nothing more then BB cars with metal wheels-there are exceptions like the 5344 and two or three others that comes with metal step,grabs and crossover.
As odd as it may sound it seems (at least to me) Athearn focus more on upgrading the former Roundhouse cars especially the FMC 50’ boxcars however,the detail errors is still there according to the freight car gurus.
I have around 20 of these upgraded FMC 50’ boxcars and like them…
The downside…That extra foot on the width stands out when viewed with a scale width car so,I run my “wide cars” with my older Athearn and Roundhouse cars and my scale width together. Thankfully I have more then enough of both.
That’s right Larry, all the older “generic” cars are being grouped togther under the “Roundhouse” name. All the better cars will be “Ready to Roll”, and the high detail cars will still be “Genesis”.
Wrong as they might be, I see nothing objectionable about most of the old blue box line - but I model a different period than you, so my interest is in a different group of them.
I have about 70 of the 50’ flat cars with vans, lightly kitbashed to be a little more accurate.
And lots of the 34’ 50 ton hoppers, 40’ and 50’ box cars, and lots of the 40’ ice reefers.
They are more than good enough for me. My cutoff date is September 1955, with a little modelers license on a few little issues…
So no plug door, waffle side, no roof walk type cars for me anyway…
What Sheldon said. Athearn is rebranding some of their products.
Basically in the past 10-15 years, there has been the RTR line and the Genesis line, but the RTR line has covered too broad a range of products, with older crude and more toylike F7’s and some of the older kit models with crude molded on details at one extreme, some other models like the GP40-2 with more detail but few if any prototypical specific parts, to very detailed rolling stock on the other extreme, such as the tunnel motors, SW1000, SW1500 etc. and upgraded freight cars.
Having such a broad range of products under one brand is a bit confusing; most other companies have classified models into subbrands, like ExactRail and others. Athearn has in the past year or two taken the Roundhouse name and re-used it to classify their most basic, lowest detail line of engines and rolling stock.
I can truly appreciate that more then you may think. I seen that BLI PRR H10 and its a beauty. That H10 with a Walthers N6B cabin would be pure delightful to behold…
You see I have a boxcar vice and that centered on IPD era boxcars. I wish I stayed with my plan of going mid 50s since its easier to model in some ways then the late 70s especially in the vehicle area.
Guessing I would say my freight cars is 70% Athearn 20% Roundhouse and the last 10% is made up of Atlas,Walthers,Accurail and ExactRail. Of that 258 out of my 347 freight cars is IPD shortline.
Gotta be a law against having that many IPD boxcars.
