Candy, one of my gripes about the early Athearn locomotives was their performance. The first thing I did with the early locomotives was to replace the sintered iron wheels with nickel silver wheels. The gear towers were then lubricated and if necessary an additional bushing was added to the worm gear. Some has quite a low of play. Then the metal clip to the trucks from the motor was removed and the motor was hard wired to the trucks. This greatly improved the performance of the locomotive, plus it really dropped the amperage draw. Out of the box I have seen these locomotives draw near three quarters of an amp. After these modifications, the draw was reduces to perhaps a tenth of an amp. An other problem I had with the stock motor in the locomotive is that it would surge going down grade and really lug down going up grade losing a lot of speed. After replacing the original Athearn motor with a can motor, it ran like a totally different locomotive. Down grade surging and upgrade lugging down was reduced to the point where it was hardly an issue. The majority of my locomotives are the Atlas Classic locomotives that came out in the 80's with the Kato drive. After the motor transplant, the athearn locomotives ran almost as good as the Atlas locomotives.
