We finally got in the long awaited Intermountain ATSF F7 Cigar Band freight locomotives. This paint has not been done by anyone for years and Intermountain has done a fine job on these. They feature cab interiors, grad irons,etched side grills, windshield wipers,Micro-Trains couplers as well as a fine drive system and heavy weight. They are DCC Ready. The paint is really stunning. This should be very exciting for those ATSF transition fans! Here is my sample. Thanks , Mike & Robin
I've got an ABBA set of the Kato F7's they did in this scheme back in the days when they put out more paint schemes than they do now, but I'm tempted by these now I see one.
Westfalen , I too have an ABA set that I made from Kato by taking the new DCC chassis , adding decoders and buying an old set of locos with the cigar band and putting those shells on the new drives. Quite an expensive task. I have been waiting for these a year and a half. Mike
I did this with older Kato passenger F3's. Worth the expense if that is what you want. And not that expensive or troublesome compared with installing decoders in older non-ready locos. I haven't done it with my cigar band F7's being content with my IM cat whisker FT's for the freight hauling. Ben
I have FT's as well but they start to fall out of my era of modeling and I think the B unit is an ugly duckling. The F7's fall at the bottom end of my era and these will likely see a lot of weathering. I now will have to work on close coupling all three. Mike
I installed DZ123's in my old Kato cigar bands, less than $20/unit and a few minutes with a file and soldering iron, the B units don't need frame modification, the decoder goes in the cut out area where the cab would be. These new IM's are still looking tempting though.
I was just wondering where I could find some cigar band F7s! How fortuitous! Is there an estimated release date/etc. ?
OK, I'm confused. This is a second run with a different number, right? I got one out of the first run that might have been like....2 years ago? Nothing against them, I love mine even though I repainted and weathered it within an inch of its life. I've got 4 Katos and this one, and I'm very happy with all of them.
Randy , I did not know if Intermountain ran these before but if they did , I and a lot of others missed them. I am so glad I didn't do what I did with my Kato GP30's when Atlas announced theirs and sold the Kato's then waited almost a year for the Atlas! Mike
Here's from the 2006 run (I got mine Dec. '06) This is stock paint with the various details added, unit number was 228C: This is the 'after' shot. I was doing a '72 unit, and ATSF really let them go when they were scheduled to go into the CF7 program anyway.
I thought IM had done the Cigar Band scheme before but didn't want to be first to say so in case I was wrong.:tb-biggrin: Maybe now that they have done a second run of these they'll get round to doing the yellow/blue warbonnet scheme, I'm pretty sure they haven't done it yet. Mike, I notice on your last photos they don't appear to have gotten the separation between the blue and yellow on the tops of the units right yet where the two colours come to too much of a 'V'. On pages 81 and 82 of The Santa Fe Diesel Vol 1 are photos showing an obvious gentle curve and another shot on page 37 showing the same on a Cat Whisker FT. Kato didn't get it right either. The nose herald is also much too small, all the prototype photos of the Cigar Band scheme I can find show a larger herald with bolder lines than used on other F unit schemes that touches the bottom corner of the number boards. Kato did a better job with the herald and also did the number board under the headlight.
Mike; Thanks for the quick and efficient service regarding the Intermountain ATSF F-7's I just ordered.:thumbs_up: Take care....
IMR has recently done both the yellow bonnet and the blue bonnet. There may be some still avaliable at dealers. BLW lists one number of the F7 bluebonnet .e.g. But I guess you mean the yellow nose / blue sides warbonnet scheme. AFAIK you are right that these haven't been done by IMR.
There weren't many of those, and the ones with blue sides were 'usually' F9's, not F7's. Seems to me when I got into this before we established there was at least one blue and yelllow warbonnet F7. There's good reason for that, because the passenger F7's had stainless steel side panels and the F9's had carbon steel as they were purchased to do freight. But this is generally the scheme: Railfan.net ABPR Image atsf289c.jpg Looking at the new run photos, do they come with side mirrors and windshield wipers now? That's pretty cool if they do. I had to add mine. Another nice little touch is the painted class lights - if you look at my first run model they were blue. These were probably the grimiest units on the entire railroad the year I model them. Mine's a mess and it is still too clean: http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=113859 The Amtrak-leased F7's got the yellowbonnets if they came up for shopping. The slower-geared freight F7's that had been regeared passenger either got yellow (several flavors), or the odd blue and silver scheme. The F9's generally were newest and lasted longer than the F7's before conversion into CF7's, so they got the full blue and yellow, apparently. The last stomping ground was flatland country, usually near a shop area like Cleburne or Argentine. And you can mix and match ALL the passenger and freight colors and put them in freight service, they were used that way on the branch line up to Superior, NE about 1973-75.
It does seem there was only one yellow/blue F7A (271C), a 202 class freight unit which also had carbon steel side panels, but would that stop IM doing it, they don't have to do four road numbers of each run, do they? I've found at least one F3B (201B) and three F7B's (268B, 276B and 280B) but the B units generally lasted longer than the A's because they were left out of the CF7 program. I've found photographic evidence of four F9A's (284C, 285L, 287C and 288L), the shot of 289C makes five, it's worth noting there were a few different variations between units in the striping on the nose. Maybe its about time IM did an F9.
