Revisiting the Athearn Genesis Central Vermont GP-9

The CV GP-9 with modified paint and corrected details.

      Correcting Some Mistakes on Athearn's CV GP-9....by Don Janes

          My new Athearn Genesis Central Vermont GP-9's finally arrived at Railway City Hobbies a couple of weeks ago.  I had ordered two of them and Jeff had them in the mail for me the next day.  I purchased road numbers 4550 and 4551.  I already had two that I custom detailed and painted many years ago so being able to get a factory painted model saved me a lot of time compared to doing all the work myself.  The models look really nice.  Great paint job and they run beautifully.  I chose the DC version as I wanted to add my own ESU Loksound decoders as I have standardized my entire diesel fleet with their decoders.  Athearn sound units come with a Tsunami 2 decoder which are excellent decoders also.

     Having said that, they did have a couple of glaring mistakes which in my opinion Athearn should not have made, especially with the paint since there are lots of colour photos of these engines they should have used for reference.  On the prototype the frame is all black from the body down, but for some reason they painted the side sills and skirting and step wells the same green as the body.  On their model of the 4547, they for some reason painted the entire end green instead of black. Other major mistakes included using a very small fuel tank similar to those on their run of CN GP-9's (which was correct for CN units but not CV units).  Another obvious mistake was using the older GP-7 style handrail stanchions on the ends instead of the correct later stamped style that should have matched the side stanchions.   I called Athearn to try and get them to replace these with the correct parts but to date haven't heard back from them.  The silly thing about the fuel tank is that they do have the correct tank as they used it on a previous run of GT GP-9's which were built in the same batch as the CV units but were sent to the GT.  Other smaller issues needed fixing also.  The air horn was put in the center of the cab roof and should have been near the front of the cab roof.  These units also had Sinclair radio antennas.  This was an easy fix. I pried the brass horn out of its hole and moved it closer to the front of the roof, filled the hole then added a new antenna where the horn was.

 

These two photos show the corrected paint on the frames and side skirts.

     Once I decided how I wanted to make all the necessary corrections I set to work.  The first thing I dealt with was the fuel tank.  A friend of mine contacted me and asked if I would be interested in trading my two small fuel tanks (which he needed for a project) for two larger tanks from a couple of his Athearn geeps.  Although they are not 100% correct (they are too long) they look a lot better than what came on the model. I will leave them but hopefully Athearn will supply the correct tanks but if they don't I will likely shorten them at some paint.. I decided to correct the paint mistake by brush painting Floquil Engine Black onto the frame, step wells and side skirts. To me this immediately made the engines look a lot better.  Once that was done I had to put new FL and FR decals at the front of the frame. This is for Front Right and Front Left.  My model was missing the EMD builder plate below the cab on the right side so I added a Microscale decal for that while I was at it. 

     Next I turned my attention to the roof details.  I removed the horn, filled the hole with some styrene tube, cut it flush with the roof and touched it up with some Trucolor CN Green.  Then I drilled a small hole and installed a Cal Scale brass Sinclair antenna. All CN family GP-9's had a V shaped pilot below the coupler between the footboards.  All my Athearn CN and CV  GP-9's lack this detail but quite a few years ago I used Juneco castings of this part to make rubber molds and poured my own pilots using resin.  I have added this detail to this unit and will add it to the other one once I get around to doing it.  It is a small detail but is quite noticeable.  I also replaced the couplers with KaDee #158 scale head couplers.  Judging from most photos I have seen of these engines, CV seemed to leave the bell in its original brass colour so I painted my bell brass.

 

This photo shows the cab roof with the relocated horn and radio antenna.

         

The above photos show the "V" shaped pilots below the couple and bell painted brass.

     

    Looking at colour photos of the prototype, George and I have come to conclusion that the handrails and stanchions are black like the model, at least when they were new but it really is hard to tell if some had been painted green to match the body or are just dirty.  I have decided to leave mine black for now but might paint them green if I can find a good colour photo showing this.  One thing that does need to be fixed is the stanchions are yellow on the frame where the are over the yellow strip.  I will get to that soon.   For this post I spray painted the frame, trucks and fuel tank a mix of Floquil Weathered Black and Engine Black to try and bring out the underbody details better in the photos.  I will eventually add some light weathering to both units.  That just about covers all the changes and corrections I made to this engine.  I will do the same to my second unit.

      One other thing I did to these engines was to add working class lights front and rear.  Athearn has finally decided to use LED lights for the headlights so I didn't have to change those but I did add working class lights front and rear.  For these I used tiny 0201 LED's.  These are so tiny that I drilled a small hole where the class light dimples were and they fit right in the class light housing.  Now that is small.  These look really good and are controlled as two separate functions, front and rear.   I also tried a Decoder Buddy from NIX Trainz. It is basically a motherboard  that has a 21 pin decoder plug on it.  It has all the resistors on the board so there is no need to add any resistors. There is also a plug on the motherboard for all the lighting functions so if you want to separate the shell from the chassis you just unplug this small board and the two parts can be easily separated.  I like these and will use them again.

     So, that pretty much wraps up the modifications and changes I made to these new Athearn models.  They make a really nice addition to my locomotive roster.

 

This view shows the LED headlight and class lights.