So recently I have gone down this bizarre HO Scale Rabbithole. Athearn’s turn of the century Branded Trains.
Around the 1990s-2000s. Athearn released these weird HO Scale Train Sets for brands like John Deere and NAPA. They usually make a train set with an F7 and some common repaints of cars.
However, around 2002 Athearn made a Genesis EMD F7 with a decent paint scheme that IMO would be a swell Freelance Scheme for a Midwestern Railroad
Hard to believe those are out of the box Athearns. Not sure that i do. At any rate, that is an awesome set of models. Agreed, if it wasnt now a livery for J.D., it would make a great midwestern small class II or III livery. Well done who ever did this part of it.
What really stands out is someone actually handling the models in a lab suit (albeit rather haphazardly). Friends and family think im strange for doing this just to ‘play with toy trains’.
Ofcourse, even when a non-modeller (not a train nut like us) sees the price tag… they totally understand the suit and gloves.
Apparently you are not familiar with the Athearn Genesis line of F units? One of the best detailed and best running F units on the market, for several decades now.
Another thing that is interesting to me is how Athearn just sometimes just recolored paint schemes (I found one JD F7 set that is clearly just recolored Canadian Pacific)
Yeah, the fuel tank on the “A” unit has definitely seem some rough handling, with all the nicks in the paint clearly visible. The video description doesn’t say they are new in box, although calling it an “unboxing” certains implies as much.
I did some digging and found HO Seeker’s promotional train setlist. Unfortunately, the link is broken so the Wayback machine is needed, and unfortunately only page 1 was archived. But this shows several more trains such as Harvey Davison, Monsanto, Saturn Cars, and the weirdest of all, Joshen.
Sadly Page 2 is broken and unarchived, so who knows how many more Athearn Promotional Train Sets are out there.
Turns out the other pages were archived, just not the main Page 2. Among them were trains for Richard Petty, International Mineral Chemicals, Railroad Tycoon II, Gaetano, and Carnation.
now this page is definitely incomplete, it lacks the Farmall set which I know is real because I own one. So perhaps there are more that are undocumented online.
