Are those the old white box Stewarts? I bought most of mine in the 90’s. They don’t have a DCC plug, but you can swap out the circuit board for a DCC board fairly easily so I’d call that nearly DCC ready. NCE and Digitrax and others make a drop in circuit board DCC decoder that simply replaces the existing circuit board. It has posts on the sides that you pull off individual wire plugs, and replug them into the DCC board that replaces. That is the older KATO chassis. The newer, late 1990’s version after Stewart began making them in the US uses an updated chassis with a different motor, but runs as quiet if not quieter, and may have DCC socket. All of my original Stewarts have KATO drives, only the F9’s which came in A/B sets in one box has the updated chasses. Dunno what Bowser has done to them since buying Steve Stewart out.
Chassis: I’d rate them WAY better than Athearn RTR F coffee grinder units, and the Stewart chassis is also much better than Proto 2000. In fact the Stewart F unit chassis is probably in the top two HO chassis ever built IMHO. Runs quiet, silky smooth and very powerful. Only my KATO GP35’s compare.
Reason I have not opened them is so I can take them back if there where bad reviews form you folks.
Quality I was worried about was the drive train, that worry has been put to rest. Far as shell detail, I don’t see great, most of the time I am 8 feet away from the bench. So I cannot see lift hooks and gap irons anyway.
If your boxes are like mine, they aren’t sealed. Besides, I should think you can take them out and look them over carefully and test run them without jeopardizing them being “returnable”. Rarely there are noisy chassis but most are nice, quiet and smooth. You need to test run it to make sure its all good. But as for quality, Stewart F7’s drive trains are the best there are, at the top with KATO and Atlas so long as you didn’t get the rare one which slipped through quality control. All brands have those so just test and be sure.
As far as detail, Stewarts don’t have much factory applied. But that doesn’t make them bad quality. In a way they are like the Athearns of the 80’s, the shell is high quality, well dimensioned and crisply molded. There just isn’t a much things like lift rings, grab irons etc, applied, but you can apply them easily enough. There are dimples for drilling the small holes molded in, so no molded on grab irons to shave off either (a plus). So consider them high quality shells with decent paint jobs that need extra details applied by you. But you didn’t pay twice the price for them either. Good news is they are good quality and dress up very nice, and run as good as the best.
Oh, and one advantage they have over Athearn Genesis is Kadee makes a nice close coupling conversion kit which gives them a nice 3’ distance between the A and B unit. Its harder to get a good conversion on the otherwise superior and
If I am feeling better Saturday I will break them out and take some pictures. I have a infected root, there is no tooth. When it was pulled part of the root did not come out. Dentist that did the work died 10 years ago. On my third round of antibiotic’s now, each has been different. I hope this one kicks the caboose out of the infection. Looking for a oral surgeon in the area.
On the box, it was sealed and engines are in plastic bags. Box is white with red X running around it if that tells you any thing.
Must be new boxes. I don’t recall mine sealed but it certainly seems you should be able to examine them, run them and be certain all is well. Let us know how the fair when you get a chance to look. Good luck on the infected root!
I have a stewart (chassis only) marked as stewart 1 7447s in two lines (the middle one with silver weight). I tried to find the diagram to repair it, does any one know what model I should look for? Thanks!
P.s> I also don’t know the model for the one in the bottom, the green circuit board said Atheran but I couldn’t figure out the exact model #, when I put an F unit shell, the steps seem to limit the rotation of the trucks, any clue will be highly appreaciated. thanks!
I would contact Bowser for assistance. They have taken over the Stewart line of F units and probably can answer your questions. They continue to sell Stewart F unit under their name but likely have diagrams and documentation for the older (Stewart revised and Stewart KATO) chassis.
Some one dug up a old post. The Stwearts I bought (4 of them) where junk! While it took a while all the motors burned out and ate there decoders. They are long gone now, traded them to Jeffery. May he RIP.
Never heard anyone call Stewart locos junk before. I’ve had at least a dozen and they were all excellent runners. Not sure why you had a hard time with them.
Same here - everyone has always love the KATO drive Stewart drives - best drive on the market - silky smooth and quiet! I have to wonder if there wasn’t something else going on.
My roster had about two-dozen Stewart/Kato/Bowser locomotives from various “runs” probably spanning ten years or more.
I had three (maybe four?) that had Bühler can motors that “burned up”. Sparks would come from the commutator, the motor would stall and the current draw would jump to about 2 amps. When looking for replacement motors I found it was cheaper to find powered chassis for only slightly more cost.
I could never figure out what failed on the motors. I ran them on a test bench and they would run fine for ten or fifteen minutes then go into a frenzy of sparking, smoking and slowing down, then just as quickly go back to running smoothly again.
These were presumably top quality, USA made motors but there must have been a bad lot of them.
Still, I would rate Bowser as one of my favorite locomotive manufacturers. It was just that one instance of the 3 bad motors that ever gave me any trouble.
Although Steward F’s are nice I have found that Athearns RTR F’s are just as nice. With a little work and detailing on both they are great runners.
The Athearn RTR runs smooth and they look great. I change out the bulbs to LEDs and close the gap between units and add some details that put it on par with other F’s that cost allot more. For around $80± for new AB units you can’t go wrong IMO.
I don’t agree at all about the Athearn RTR looking great. Athearn may put nicer paint jobs on the RTR version than the old blue box version but the basic Athearn F7A shell is to my eye very crude by even 1990’s standards but considering the molds were tooled in the 1950’s it isn’t a suprise. The windshield openings are oversized and gross looking, the side air grills are just horizontal grooves and have no detail, the numberboards on the nose are poorly shaped when compared to the real thing, the top head light casting is also poor.
The Stewart basic F unit shell is orders of magnitude better in appearance and fidelity.
Ed (missing you at the dinner) My had the Buhler motors so that explains why I called them junk. I don’t remember how long they ran but when they started BBQing Decoders I got rid of them.
Ken, I don’t know what motors the KATO chassis had in them, but I haven’t heard any complaints about them so far and they’ve been out since the late 1980’s. I’ve got around 13 of the original Stewart F units (white box with red plaide) and they are nice and heavy and run really smoothly as one would expect from a KATO drive.
After Stewart brought the KATO tooling over to the US in the mid-late 1990’s, he modified the chassis so they had a different motor and circuit board. Modelers found they ran smooth as the KATO drives but I have not heard long-term if those chassis have held up as well. Bowser took over Stewart Hobbies in 2004 and has continued to provide the legacy Stewart F units as well as versions in the “Executive Line”.
I can only personally vouch for the original KATO drive F units which I have run, and they have a long history of highly satisfied customers over the past 25 years.
Bowser used Buehler motors (which at one time had a good reputation; Overland Models used them, too) for a little while on the former Stewart line engines, and they did receive some complaints about the Buehler motors, which prompted them to search for other motors, which also briefly resulted in the low torque motor that appears to have only been used for maybe two years by Bowser/Atlas/Intermountain (who share the same factory) prior to all of them dumping it and replacing it.
I’ve never heard of any complaints about the original Kato drives. I unloaded those Atlas/Kato and Stewart/Kato models off the delivery trucks years ago, and well remember when they were the “gold standard” of the hobby. In some ways I think people were happier then, with less “expectations” of the imported trains than today.
There also were Stewart models with Athearn drives, and I don’t remember what motor was in them (included but not limited to the original U25B)
John. Not wanting to derail the thread about Stewart, but what years did those other manufacturers install the low torque motors? Do you know what specific runs?
