Athearn - 1554 - Covered Hopper, 3-Bay, ACF 4600 - St. Mary's Railway West LLC (SMW) - 815345

Road Name History: St. Mary’s Railway West LLC.(SMW) is a privately owned and operated Class III Short Line Railroad, located in the Heart of South East Georgia, servicing customers from all over the United States and Canada by providing safe storage for idle and/or under-utilized railcars and locomotives.

St. Mary’s Railway West's close proximity to the "CSX Rice Yard” in Waycross, GA, one of the largest CSX Classification Hump Yards, provides easy access to our railcar storage facility.

SMW is served daily by our Class I partner. St. Mary's guarantees 24 – 72 hours or faster delivery time frame, from initial request to delivery of requested railcars to the CSX interchange, plus provides customized and personalized services are only some of the many advantages, when storing your equipment with St. Mary's.

While in storage, St. Mary's Railway is able to offer a variety of additional services, e.g, state of the art food grade railcar cleaning (coming soon) and repair services by St. Mary's RRA, Coastal Railcar Services LLC., thus making the facility the perfect one-stop service solution.

St. Mary’s Railway prides itself to provide services with utmost attention to detail to our diversified client base.

St. Marys Railway West has not been affiliated with the St. Marys Railroad, which operates between St. Marys and Kingsland, since SMRW purchased the 23 miles of track from CSXT on June 4, 2004.

Brand/Importer Information: Athearn's history began in 1938, when its founder-to-be, Irvin Athearn, started an elaborate O scale layout in his mother's house. After placing an ad selling the layout, and receiving much response to it, Irv decided that selling model railroads would be a good living. He sold train products out of his mother's house through most of the 1940s. After becoming a full-time retailer in 1946, Irv opened a separate facility in Hawthorne, California in 1948, and that same year he branched into HO scale models for the first time.

Athearn acquired the Globe Models product line and improved upon it, introducing a comprehensive array of locomotive, passenger and freight car models. Improvements included all-wheel drive and electrical contact. One innovation was the "Hi-Fi" drive mechanism, employing small rubber bands to transfer motion from the motor spindle to the axles. Another was the double-ended ring magnet motor, which permitted easy connection to all-wheel-drive assemblies. Athearn was also able to incorporate flywheels into double-ended drives.

The company produced a model of the Boston & Maine P4 class Pacific steam locomotive which incorporated a cast zinc alloy base and thermoplastic resin superstructure. It had a worm drive and all power pickup was through the bipolar trucks that carried the tender. This item was discontinued after the Wilson motor was no longer available, and was not redesigned for a more technologically advanced motor.

Athearn's car fleet included shorter-than-scale interpretations of passenger cars of Southern Pacific and Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad prototypes. The company also offered a variety of scale-length freight cars with sprung and equalized trucks. The cars could be obtained in simple kit form, or ready-to-run in windowed display boxes. The comprehensive scope of the product line contributed to the popularity of HO as a model railroad scale, due to the ready availability of items and their low cost.

Irv Athearn died in 1991. New owners took control in 1994, but continued to follow Athearn's commitment to high-quality products at reasonable prices. Athearn was bought in 2004 by Horizon Hobby. Athearn was then moved from its facility in Compton to a new facility in Carson, California. In mid-2009, all remaining US production was moved to China and warehousing moved to parent Horizon Hobby. Sales and product development was relocated to a smaller facility in Long Beach, California.

Read more on Wikipedia and Athearn website.