Received one of the Athearn Airslides decorated for Penn Central in the mail today. The tooling is exquisite, extremely fine. If this is going to be the new standard at the high end, the bar just got raised (until the BLMA hopper comes out and raises it again). A couple of issues though:
The plastic nest slightly compressed the top-left and back-right corners of the roof, and subesquently the delicate corner posts. Now, I don't mind because some slight body damage looks realistic and I'm going to weather this puppy, but it's something to look out for when you buy them.
The second point is one of annoyance that has nothing to do with the quality of the model. The second car, PC 878857, matches one of the Atlas releases from the last year or so. I thought that the first car also matched an Atlas release, but it is 878846 (as opposed to Atlas' PC 878841). If I hold onto the Atlas cars, I'll have to alter the road number on one of them. I have yet to see if the Atlas model can stand next to the Athearn model and not look out of place.
The last point on the Airslide (and the SP bay window) - I haven't unscrewed a coupler box yet, but it doesn't appear to have the recesses for the Micro-Trains centering nubs, so it may not be easy to convert the new Athearn models from McHenry to MTL if desired.
