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A little guilty pleasure that arrived the other day.

SO, YES, I went out on a limb and purchased both Athearn Genesis Penn Central ‘modernised’ F-unit A-B sets! Just a treat to myself for working so hard last year. I had hoped to build some of these up using the Highliners body, but Athearn has made things much easier and quicker with these new ‘out of the box’ models that it seemed crazy not to splash out.

The only one I didn’t purchase was the red ‘P’ painted locomotive, although I’m kind of tempted now. This short lived attempt to brighten up the austere PC black was long gone by my modelling period, which is right at the ‘fag end’ of the Penn Central era, just before Conrail took over (of course, when I say modelling period, I really mean era in which my interest lies. I’m really no more than a collector of PC locos. I actually model the early 2000s in US ‘HO’).

Anyway, back to the PC F-units. Overall, they’re not bad products, as you’d expect from the Genesis brand, although there are quite a few much publicised errors of detail and lettering. I’m not sure how these could happen, but some of them, such as the lack of small overhang on the PC 1772 and PC 3437 as least, are damn near impossible to correct, which means that the units will have to be renumbered to ones that do match. As has been pointed out on at least one e-group, Athearn also spelt Collinwood wrong, which is the unit allocation, giving it an unwarranted ‘G’.

Most PC F-units also sported black painted side grilles, while Athearn has left them unpainted. The grilles are also fitted in Athearn’s standard practice, which involves a sort of adhesive pad rather than etched tabs which you would have thought would have been more logical. The glue is the sort that never really ‘goes off’ so the grilles keep slightly detaching from the sides.

Other aspects of the models are very tasty, with the two A-units featuring different pilots, headlight and horn type, lifting lugs, antenna position, etc depending on their previous owner (NYC or PRR), while one of the B-units is equipped with a steam generator. The lack of body skirting is very noticeable and has been well reproduced, although I think more ‘daylight’ should be visible through the various underframe tanks. The tail lights are also in a different position depending on PRR or NYC spec.

Back to the griping, one other little detail aspect that I wasn’t impressed with was the plastic grabs on the nose. While they are nice and thin, they are exceptionally fragile, and one of my units arrived with three out of the five side grabs already half broken, and I hadn’t even taken them out of the plastic sleeving! On contacting Athearn they said they were happy to supply a detail sprue with new grabs when they had some in stock, but these are just asking to be made out of metal.

The issues take the gloss off what are otherwise excellent new models, but as can be seen from the pictures they are still very nice locomotives that provide an excellent starting point for a set of top notch PC ‘effs’.