I was looking at my ahm sw-8 switcher yesterday next to my c630 and noticed that the switchers cab is taller than the c-630. In fact it looks bigger in all aspects. I also compared my gp-18 ahm to my roundhouse rs-3 and they also look out of scale to me, now I have never seen in person these next to each other but they look off to me. What is your opinion on this, am I wrong or are there obvious scale miscompares?
Help me out please
mike
If the larger models are AHM, they are quite old & probably not to true scale. The old motors were larger than todays and AHM and others made the models larger to accomodate the motors. My [2c]
AHM (Associated Hobby Manufacturers), in its day, was about the cheapest of the cheap. Over the years, AHM became IHC (International Hobby Corporation), but the quality is much better than what AHM produced.
I have some 1970’s vintage AHM rolling stock with horribly oversized wheel flanges, truck-mounted couplers, and bodies cast from plastic that is more than 1/16" thick. They are so poorly made they aren’t worth trying to upgrade.
I’ve noticed differences, guess they all don’t use the same ruler 
…stop buying AHM products. They are crude at best.
David B
My understanding is that the Norfolk & Western Mallets were huge engines, but my PCM Y6 is considerably smaller than the BLI Pennsy J1 2-10-4 next to it, and to the Rivarossi Alleghenny. I just noticed this the other day. [%-)] I don’t know about length…I haven’t checked, but the height disparity is startling. The other two appear to be about 12-15" taller.
I’ve seen this as well I have two different F40’s. One is an Athaern from the late 60’s/ early 70’s and it’s much bigger than one from Lifelike from around 1990 or so. The difference in size is both in width, lenght and heigth. The Athearn one’s motor is much, much larger and I guess they built the shell to accomodate it.
ChessieRR,
Athearn never made an F40…let alone anyone else in the late-1960’s/early-1970’s unless they could see the future (F40’s weren’t made by EMD until 1976.).
Perhaps you meant some other model?
Paul A. Cutler III
Weather Or No Go New Haven
Interesting… take a look at some of the prebuilt structures from different manufacturers side by side… they sometimes aren’t the same either. In fact, there is a prebuilt station (Model Power, I think) that looks almost exactly like the old Atlas station but it is about 80% of the size. Like you, I wonder which one is correct.
dlm
So this seems to be common among all products. How do products of the same vintage seem to compare. Here is an experiment for those who have a lot more stuff collected than I do.
Take several atlas products of the same build date(or athern ect…) and compare them side by side. Does a switcher engine look bigger in scale than the bigger 6 axel road diesels.
Also those of you with the scale rulers and such measure the model and compare it to the 1:1 deal. Do they come close or not?
This has really gotten me curious especially with the last thread saying he had 2 similar buildings but that were different sizes.
Please post your findings. I am sure everyone else would like to see them as well.
The old Lionel/Bachmann GP30 is too tall in comparison to the prototype. I think the P2Ks are the correct height.
There’s an old MR detailing article about modifing a Blue-box SP GP60’s trucks to lower it to the correct height. The author said the Blue-box GP38-2/40-2/50/60 trucks are about a half-scale-foot too high to allow them to negotiate tight radii curves more easily.
Modern models are a lot better about being to correct scale than older models. Remember the “fat hood” Athearns of yesteryear?
6 axle road diesels are not always the biggest thing out there. Compare an RSC-3 and a GP38-2.
This has been done in every product review in MR for the past 30 years.
Key word; similar. They are NOT the same. You can find photos of interlocking towers that are similar but size-wise, completely different.
Keep in mind that because we are into modeling and we expect that our toys will run on radaii that dont exsist in the real world, that some compromises always have to take place. But you CANNOT compare Model Power with Kato products or Old Athearns with Atlas units…you just cant. Nor can you from the same ‘build date’ because the models were often produced in different countries (Atlas at one point had their FP units produced by Roco and their Geeps produced by Kato).
With today’s offereings, we are spoiled. Everything is getting ever so closer to being prototypical, but we still have compromises.
David B
AHM/Rivarrossi have been noted to overscale their engines slightly
Y6B’s were shorter than Big Boys and Allegheney, but because they are designed to get the most weight on the drivers, what they are are fatter engines and the allegheney is one phat engine. This is how they got more power and weight on the drivers.
As popular as the Big Boy may be those 2 engines outpowered it.