Yesterday while I was out of the house, someone dropped off an apple box full of old HO scale stuff on my porch [:O]. It was all Athearn, Atlas, and Plasticville stuff (plus some Matchbox/Lesney vehicles, unfortunately all have corrosion on them). There were 3 engines: 2 Athearn F-7’s (1 missing all of it’s drive parts) and an AHM Plymouth switcher. After cleaning and lube both of the engines ran (F-7 good, switcher fair). My IHC parts catalog identified the AHM one as the 1967 model. I’m interested in finding the age of the Athearn one. As you can see in the photo it has a gear drive instead of the rubber band one (oddly the frame isn’t stamped “Athearn” like it is on the other F unit).
Everything except 1 building and a couple pieces of track were in good condition. The newspaper lining the bottom of the box was dated 1975 so there’s a chance that is when they were packed away[:|]
I agree with the date. I had one of those Athearn Milwaukee F7s when I was a boy, back in the Eisenhower administration.
It was the only one of my boyhood engines that ran well enough to get a decoder when I returned to the hobby and pulled those trains out of their 40-year slumber. The engine’s gear noise is so loud that it doesn’t need a sound decoder, though.
I agree with the date as well. I’ve received several of the old Athearn locos in the past couple of years. One had the old Hi-F (RDC1), one was an Athearn GP7 shell on a Hobbytown drive. The other three were the 60’s era gear drive your loco has. One was an F7 B unit and the other two were GP30’s. Regrettably all three were little more than junk. I made the F7 B into a dummy unit.
I don’t know how old the engine is, but at 81 I know how old I am and perhaps too old to be in this game; particularly when I read that Mister Beasley was a boy during the Eisenhower administration. However, in spite of my age, when I figure out how to send pictures I will post my efforts to kitbash an Atlas 25’ turntable into a 90’ TT.
Well the mystery is solved. Turns out my neighbor (who’s in the process of moving) was the one who dropped the stuff off. He bought it back in the 60’s and packed it up when he went to college.
Might as well post pic’s of the other stuff that was included:
All of the cars are Athearn (except the Maunta Armor reefer and Hotco Reading flat) with sprung metal trucks. All of the buildings (except a depot that’s in pieces) are complete. Not pictured is a MRC Throttlepack that still works nicely.
I once bought one of those Athearn “tower drive” trucks out of the junk bin at my LHS for a repowering experiment. Boy, was it noisy! But it ran smooth!
Athearn made an even earlier gear drive than that one in the mid to late 50’s. The gear design was practically identicle, but the trucks were solid metal with very long bearings for the tower gears, and they had an even larger square motor. Athearn changed to plastic trucks and the motor in yours to reduce costs, and then a few years later switched to the gear system that’s still in use today in almost all their 4-axle diesels.
Here is a link to a post I made some time ago that explains in detail the entire process involved in posting pictures. It was aimed at computer dinosaurs like me so it is rather long, but the process works. There are other methods. It assumes you have a digital camera.
