# Roundhouse Trains



## Flash53 (Dec 19, 2009)

Can anyone give me some words of wisdom about Roundhouse Trains? I came across their website by accident and have never heard of them. Seems they may have gone from Roundhouse to MDC to Hobbylinks.

How is the quality of their locomotives compared to Bachmann Spectrum for instance?

Thanks
Steve


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## tkruger (Jan 18, 2009)

I have built 3 of the older Roundhouse locomotives and close to 40 pieces of their rolling stock. I built 1 ALCO RS3 and 2 Climax locomotives. The instructions were good. The resulting RS3 is a strong runner. I did need to rebuild the front truck even though it was preassembled (something must have come loose over time). This loco is slower than the other Athearn Blue Box road switchers that I have that would have been from the same era. Pulling power is close to that but not quite as much as an Athearn Blue Box GP35. As for the climax locomotives. They have good detail for the time they were manufactured. They do run loud. The climaxes can pull well and have a great amount of torque. They are also slow and geared way down. Prototypically this is to be expected since the prototypes had a top speed of ~20 MPH. All f these will not work if you are running turns less than 18r. The RS3 will make the turn but the location of the coupler will cause the car behind it to derail.

Roundhouse was bought by Athearn and then discontinued recently. They have not made locomotive that I am aware of since being bought by Athearn. What website did you find these on?


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## Flash53 (Dec 19, 2009)

Website was found by keying Roundhouse Trains. A lot of their stuff shows discontinued by some is current. 

One of the LHS in the area have some steam engines made by roundhouse but have no idea of the quality. 4-4-0 american DCC with sound for $200+


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## tooter (Feb 26, 2010)

I have a couple of old discontinued Roundhouse engines and *really* like them... 

Like kruger said, the logging locomotive is geared *super low* with all wheel pickup and all wheel drive so it pulls real good and only hits about 25 scale miles per hour flat out. The universal joints are also super loud...  









I also have a little Roundhouse EMD-40 industrial locomotive... it's also very low geared with twin flywheels for smooth low speed operation. It's wired for DCC but I only run low tech DC.


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## MacDaddy55 (Aug 19, 2008)

*From Athearn Blue Boxes to Roundhouse!*

Yeah, Athearn purchased Roundhouse and it looks like the second phase of obsolete boxed model rolling stock to RTR rolling stock is in the works. Its getting harder to find Boxed kits at the LHS in Green Bay so Ebay has become the new hunting ground. I have about 25 roundhouse kits and found them to be ,on certain levels, on par with Athearn. so all in all you can't go wrong especially if you are kit bashing and weathering!:thumbsup:


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