Athearn Passenger Cars

I'm thinking about putting together an ATSF passenger train, and looking for a little guidance. I'll probably want to have a pretty good selection of the different cars available. I'm leaning towards Athearn because of their price, but I want to light up the cars and add seats & stuff. Any suggestions? Pros and cons? I've got a champagne taste on a beer budget, and a bunch of work to turn the "beer" into "champagne", even if it is a cheap "champange" or "sparkling cider" is O.K.

I'll probably build my own constant voltage lighting system for the cars once I pick up the power from the track, miniature lights, painted interior, ... What trucks would you suggest to pick up the power without breaking the bank? The windows I'll probably make myself. Where's a good source for the seats and a few people?

Any suggestions I'd appreciate.

Mark

 

IHC has their passenger cars on sale for $7.99 ea. I don't know how that compares to Athearn, but that's a darn good deal for full length passenger cars. I'm not a purist, so i can't say how accurate their Santa Fe cars are, but the ones i have sure look good. They list SF cars in smoothside and corregated, and have interiors kits on sale for $3 to $4. Checkem out at: www.ihc-hobby.com Shipping is free on orders over $45. Yep, i'm sold on them-i've got 10 seven car trains from them. Curt

 

Mark, First...what size is your layout? If it's curve radius is less than 30 then Athearn cars are the only ones that will work without major refinements to the trucks. If the radii are larger than 32 then IHC or Riverossi would work, Ideal for these cars are 34 and above though.
As for style of cars. Athearn has the basic...Coach, Baggage, RPO, Diner, Dome and observation. IHC/Riverossi has these plus, Combine, sleeper Rummette and DOMED Observation. What will dicatate what you can run are your curves on your layout. As far as Detail. IHC is the best one I've found. Hope this helps

 

I guess it's a case of where you want your compromises! I'm building a Santa Fe passenger set at present, so I'll share some of what I've discovered.

Here's a quick run-down of some Santa Fe prototypes i've found.

The Athearn SL Baggage & RPO are actually scale length and (fanfare) Santa Fe Prototypes! Yay! So that's those sorted....go out and buy them without fear of the prototype police

Now the rest of the Athearn cars are all too short by a good margin, *but* that has a couple of advantages, namely:
a. As already mentioned, they handle sharp curved fairly well. (and don't overhang so much if you do have them).
b. If you're a modeller who's short of space (are there any that aren't ) then you can get a 10 coach passenger train in the space of say 8 coaches (not exact figures, just an illustration.)
The opposite side of that coin is that you are buying a couple of extra coaches to fill a given train length, so that does work both ways.
I also suspect that the rest of the Athearn coaches are "chopped down" Santa Fe prototypes, so there you go.
They also have metal wheels on one side of each truck, which could be useful for your lighting project, but have no interiors.

If you want scale length (my personal preference) there are again some Santa Fe prototypes out there. On the upper side of the "beer" end of the market are the new Walthers cars, I'm told the coach is a Santa Fe prototype and the sleeper is very close to a build for them as well. These are really great models but a fair bit of $ more than Athearn. They come with interiors and are pre-wired for lighting. (there's apparently a clip-in lighting kit available separately)

The Con Cor fluted side cars also have some Santa Fe prototypes, look for their Diner, Coach, Angle ended dome (not the curvy one) and round ended obs are all pretty good for the Santa Fe, although I believe some of these (coach especially) should have different roofs to those supplied. No interiors or lighting.

Another one is the Bachmann full length dome car, this model is fairly old, and suffers from a few inaccuracies, but is on the whole not bad. It has a basic interior.

Hope that's a help.

 

While my mainline minimum radius is 30", I have a helix (intended for freight interchange only) which is 26", and I have run the IHC cars on it with no mods. I'd be inclined to say they would run on 24" as well, I haven't tried it. They won't look to good doing it, but no problem mechanics wise.

Gary

 

The curves are a concern to me, as I've got a folded dogbone track with now crossovers on a 4 X 8 table I've built. 37' of running track set up mainly for railfanning. I'm scenic-ing it right now with a mountain, tunnel, bridges, ...... My freight trains run great after all the tweaking I've done on the track. I've been able to run up to 37 coal and ore cars and 5 locomotives together on the track, which looks pretty impressive, but definately not prototypical! It doubles over itself twice on one part of the track. I've got two curves on about a 19" radius, one of which will be pretty much buried inside a mountain. The other curves are on about a 21" or 22" radius. My grades are running about 4% and are on the wider curves.

From what everybody is saying, IHC may be the better car, but couldn't handle my layout? Athearn would probably work.....?

Does anybody know of a source for Athearn interiors? The cars are available from www.toytrainheaven.com for $7.30, but I would like to find some interiors.... Any ideas besides buying the IHC interiors and chopping them up?

Mark.

P.S. Toytrainheaven appears to have some of the best HO prices around. I haven't bought much from them yet though. kchobbies is another good source. He's not always quick, but the prices are quite good.

 

I have the 8 car set from IHC in Overland Pacific Heavy Passenger. As of right now the only track I have to operate them on will be 18" radius. I will try it this weekend and tell you what happens...they sure won't look good on those tight curves but we will see if they track. Couldn't pass up the price, and eventually I will have a mainline that can handle them better...

 

I've got no hesitation in reccomending the Athearn cars if you're down to 19" rad curves. Anything else would be in danger of both looking silly and running badly.

AFAIK nobody does a drop in interior for the
Athearn cars, so it may be a case of chopping others up.

A few things I've picked up as you're building the Athearn cars:

Put any interior things (lights, seats, people) inside as you build them, the shells are *really* difficult to get apart once they are together, the top & bottom kind of lock together.

Glue the windows in, don't trust them to a push fit as the instructions say, also due to the problem of trying to get the body back off! <Been there, nearly trashed my RPO trying to get it apart to re-install windows that dropped out)

Before you assemble them, spray the trucks silver (they come as grey plastic) and they look much better like that.

They also come with a truck mounted coupler bar, which may need a little experimentation with depended on how gently your grades & curves start!

Good luck