Hello all well it’s my 50th Birthday today I feel good gonna have me 1 beer later today,Anyway I got a box of ho trains from my friend he sent me the name on the.Boxes is called,Associated Hobby MFRS.Inc so I got a UP engine not sure what kind it is,But I am not sure how to make this engine run below are some photos I took of it.It shows the wheels and gears on iand it also has the little black,O rings for traction hoping somone here can help me out.To get this UP engine running.
Hi there and happy belated birthday!
AHM imported from various manufacturers. That one looks like a Rivarossi. I found the following on HOseeker:
https://hoseeker.net/AHMRivarossiassembly/ahmfmbl2pg4.jpg
and this:
https://hoseeker.net/AHMRivarossiassembly/ahmbuildersbiblepage104.jpg
Good luck!
Simon
Thanks for the reply it would be more helpful if I had photos of the inderneath of the FM diesel,With the metal plates of so I can see where to put the gears and wheels,Thanks for your reply that helped me out.
Happy birthday sir and congratulations on having the self control at age 50 to enjoy just ONE beer!
The engine you have is a model of the Fairbanks Morse “C Liner” cab locomotive. In its time the FM C Liner was remarkable because Fairbanks Morse offered it in a variety of horsepower ratings, some of them quite high for the early 1950s, igher than what EMD offered. Rivarossi, the Italian model railroad firm, first made an HO model in the late 1950s, and I think Polk Hobbies was the importer. AHM (Associated Hobby Manufacturers) later became a major importer of Rivarossi stuff, including some interesting steam locomotives like the UP Big Boy and New York Central Hudson, but they also arranged for Rivarossi to license some eastern European firms to make knockoffs more cheaply. AHM would sometimes have astonishing sales where things like the C Liner might sell for $8. I can recall the after Christmas sales at Woolworths where they were practically giving the stuff away. $1 freight cars and that sort of thing
Anyway , you are correct there is a rubber traction tire on one wheel of your engine. I recall only one truck is powered, but that traction tire gave it impressive pulling power. Unfortunately, for many years Rivarossi (and AHM) stubbornly insisted on wheel flangers that were so much bigger than anyone else’s, and way bigger than even the oldest NMRA standards (they wanted their stuff to also sell in the kid’s trainset market I guess) that it could only run on Code 100 track. Indeed even handspiked Code 100 would sometimes cause “clicking” noise as the flanges hit the spike heads. When Code 83 started to become popular many guys found they had to retire their AHM stuff, you could put new wheels on the freight and passenger cars, but the flanges on locomotives were harder to fix and most gave up.
Thus AHM stuff is fairly plentiful at swap meets so if you need parts for your C Liner don’t g