Vintage Athearn Model Trains

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When model-trains enthusiast Irvin Athearn founded Athearn Trains in 1946, his first model-train kits were in O scale. But within just a few years, Athearn had added a line of HO-scale trains to his company's catalog. In the 1950s, Athearn sold...
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When model-trains enthusiast Irvin Athearn founded Athearn Trains in 1946, his first model-train kits were in O scale. But within just a few years, Athearn had added a line of HO-scale trains to his company's catalog. In the 1950s, Athearn sold his O-scale products to another manufacturer, while his company became so well regarded for its HO trains that Lionel hired Athearn Trains to produce its first lines of HO locomotives and rolling stock. The Athearn trains were sold as kits, its pieces made out of stamped steel. Because steel was still in short supply after World War II, Athearn took whatever it could get when it came to raw materials, which is why the interiors of some postwar Athearn box and refrigerator cars had Coca-Cola logos on them, evidence that the intended end products of those sheets had been bottle caps. At the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, Athearn was still an all-steel shop, but that changed in 1951 when the company released an HO-scale version of a 200-ton wrecking crane, whose parts were diecast. That same year Athearn purchased a company called Globe Models, which allowed Athearn to experiment with plastic trains made using new injection-molding technology. The plastic locomotives were initially sold under the Globe brand, but by 1955 they had been incorporated into the Athearn family of model-train products, and packaged in yellow boxes. This "yellow-box era" of vintage Athearn trains ran from 1955 until 1966. The 1950s is also the decade when Athearn locomotives evolved from being powered by rubber bands to motors, as well as being able to draw electricity from the track. Kits requiring less and less assembly were sold, as well as trains requiring no assembly at all. It was also in the 1950s that Athearn began packaging its train kits in blue boxes, a practice that was only discontinued in 2009, when the company had already decided to offshore all of its manufacturing to China. For collectors of vintage model...
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