What do you guys think of these units? I recently bought some on E-bay and I am very impressed with how good they run And how many cars they will pull. I also have a trainline Amtrak F40 it is a smooth running heavy pulling beast too!
I got a nice discount on an older Trainline GP15-1 from the back shelf of a hobby shop. I’ve converted it to DCC and find it does run quite well, fairly slow and quiet, makes a good switcher. No complaints.
Tilden
My only complaint so far is my “GP9M” is really a GP7 engine!! [D)] Other than that I haven’t really had a problem with mine.
Actually those are sweet looking engines that are great performers at a very reasonable price.I have 3 GP15-1s and no real complaint here except for some detail errors and the engine sets to high…But,hey,beats no GP15-1 and I likes 'em!
I’ve heard that the GP9M units are wide bodies like the Athearn GP9 is this true? Too bad walthers wouldn’t rerelease the GP15 as well as the 8-40B. Both these engines are becoming harder to find. I was looking for a Dash8 on Ebay the other day and the only one I found was in Australia!
Yes the GP9M has a wide body…I believe this locomotive was first release by Lionel in the 60s.
What do you mean by wide body? As far as I know, there weren’t any full cowl GP9Ms!
I have one of these, it needs a lube job, but it has directional headlights and a T1 decoder, and is gettng repainted into WRS red and white.
I am very happy with my GP9M in Burlington Northern paint. It runs smooth and quiet and has a nice paint.
And for the price on sale at Walthers at the time, you cant beat it for nice local or yard engine. Its a strong puller to.
Mark
Wide body means the shell hood is significantly wider than it should be, based on the real thing. A prime example of this is the Athearn blue box SD45. At the time it was tooled, there weren’t cost effective motors that would fit in an SD45 body shell if it was molded to correct scale dimensions. So they just made the hood an extra scale foot too wide and the motor would fit. The nose was also the same width to match the hood and this all made the SD45 look too fat. Other hood units followed this principle and look “wrong” because of it. Some people can tolerate the fat HO hood units. I certainly cannot, so I don’t own any fat hood units from the Athearn blue box fleet or other brands either. There is no need in this day and age.
I’ve heard the GP15’s run well generally, but it depends on what run they are from. I’ve heard the first run are so so, and later runs are smooth.
I have 3 of the F40PH’s from Walthers, and until KATO produced theirs, the Walthers F40PH was the best on the market in my opinion. Even KATO’s aren’t perfect and the nose anticlimber is exactly the same as Walthers and not quite right.
Oh. It was painted in Guilford before, and numbered 470, which is un-prototypical.
With all of the recent releases from Athearn it is curious that they haven’t anounced a new GP9 model with ascale width hood! This is especially true considering the anouncment of the new SD40-2 models. Wouldn’t a accurate GP unit out sell a high hood SD? No offense to the NS and NW fans.[(-D]
I think so. I would really like a GP9u/30/35/38AC/38-2, but the price on accurate models is very high. Perhaps this could be a new superdetailing thing I could do…?
What should I start with?
Maybe Athearn hasn’t released a scale width hood GP9 or GP7 probably because it would require all new tooling and there are GP7’s and GP9’s already available from Proto2000. Athearn has release some loco’s based on upgraded tooling that was already in existence.
The GP7 is covered by Atlas and Walthers/P2K.The only GP9 is the P2K that has a $135.00 price tag…A moderately price GP9 would be welcome by many.
The Walthers GP9M is not readily accepted by modelers due to the wide body and lack of detail due to the old tooling and the superior Atlas GP7 and the P2K GP7/9 are the preferred geeps.
I have two of the GP15s so far. I added some see-through grilles and Cannon stuff to this one:
It turned out pretty well, but the next one is gonna get the full Cannon treatment, just because I want to try building a hood from the sill up. [:)]
Wow you did a great job! I"ve been planning to get down to NS sometime and see some of the action on the CB&CNS. I would love to see the big SD45-2s lugging trains on some of the grades. How about some pictures of your other models? Got any CN?
I have some model photos on my website - look in my profile for the link. There’s a couple of CN models there that I did for other people.
I don’t do much CN lately, although I do have an RSC14 on the bench now and I’m planning to model a passenger-service RS18 to pull a short train of the new Rapido coaches. I’m a “reformed” CN modeller. [:)]
Hey! No real trains allowed here![:D][bow][bow][bow][bow]