I'm going to be honest and admit to the AHM GP18. What a piece of work this was. The number was 9??. But I think I was 11 or 12 so I didn't know or care at the time
I'm sure many of us went for the AHM GP18. Mine was a Lackawanna unit, which I quickly repainted into b/y and numbered it 500-something. (Without stripping it - you could still read the original lettering under the black paint!) I also had the AHM RS-2, got them both together, don't remember its road name. It also got the b/y treatment. Sold them years later at a swap meet. Maybe they are still running somewhere? Ken
A buddy of mine, (who is a group member, but I'll leave his identity secret for now) did a set of Frisco F units in black and yellow, using Krylon spray paint. They looked great from about ten feet.
This thread topic has caused me to reminisce into the deep, dark folds of my model railroad memory - clear back to the early days. I guess my VERY FIRST Frisco locomotive, when I first got into HO in the summer of 1961 after being exposed to the SLSF during my freshman year at MSM, was a Tyco/Mantua 2-8-2. It didn't look anything like any "Mike" the Frisco had, but I decaled it up with Champ decals as a SLSF 41xx-something, and away we went. It ran very well, and would pull anything. I used a pic from Bain's Frisco Folks to serve as a guide for the decal job. The coonskin under the headlight was a cardboard cutout from a Frisco matchbook I got at the Rolla depot. It was a bit too big, but it looked pretty neat to me - no number in it, it just said Frisco. It was totally amateur looking, but I had fun with it and it set the hook in me on modeling the Frisco. I later added the Mantua 0-6-0 and the Tyco/Mantua 4-6-2 to the roster, both with Frisco numbers - this long before my first Frisco diesel (Athearn F7). I sold all three of them when I got out of the hobby after Kurt was born. Later, I tried to buy them back for sentimental reasons, but the guy wouldn't sell them. Guess he liked 'em too! It's a great hobby, and a great railroad to be a fan of, for sure. Ken
Anytime you buy a new model, well atleast for me, YOu cant wait to get it home, out of the box and power it up. YOu have a borderline craziness in your eyes and all you wanna do is fire it up and put a train behind it! My first FRISCO model was an Athearn U-30-B dummy. And an Athearn SD45. Both locomotives came from a private estate that had belonged to a FRISCO modeler whom is no longer with us. The estate was handed over to the club to be taken to the next trainshow and sold for whatever they could get. We as members of the club got first crack at the ok of the family. At that time I was actually modeling the Union Pacific bacause my first actual engine was a UP FA manufactured by LifeLike and came as a set. Man I remember buying a set of Microscale FRISCO diesels decals and painting the UP right off of that engine. Thinking back now, That engine looked absolutely horrid compared to the practice I have had over the years. I still call it practice because I still aint as good as Mr. Wirth or any of the other guys that have those absolutely georgeous Steamers!
My first Frisco unit was an Athearn U30B I painted & decaled myself back in 1984. Since then, I painted my diesels, and didn't buy a pre-painted model until Athearn came out with the GP38-2 in o/w (still wrong details & number, but I took care of that). Among my collection is a Proto2000 E8A and a Spectrum Russian Decapod (the latter I got for 80 bucks in Cheyenne, WY of all places). Oddest I've seen (and didn't buy) was a Lionel Frisco train set- all the cars were in o/w, as was the GP7. It was at a train show in Oregon in 2006....... And yes, I was temped by the AHM GP18- even saw one in Tulsa this month, but avoided it like the plague.
