ATHEARN HO DRIVE BELT

@joe krasko posted:

Looking to replace belts on several Atheran Budd cars from the 70's...I remember using dental retainer bands...my question is what size...thanks in advance....joe

I don't know what size of dental retainer bands, but I also saw mentioned here getting a bag of rubber bands from the beauty section of a drug store. So I got a pack of assorted sizes of black rubber bands in the beauty section of Rite-Aid drugs and they seem to work ok on my Athearn blue box RDC car.

Yep, still have two of those belt drive Athearns.  I think they can actually approach the speed of sound at half throttle.  I thought about putting in those powered truck retrofit units a couple decades ago, but said, nah, they are just fun to run.  Train world still stocks these, #90101, and they list it as the last set available right now.  They sort of look like the kind a kid uses with braces too.

Thanks to all,got them,all Budd cars back in service...

Thanks for the tip!  Got 2 'Hustlers' from that era, one of which is cosmetically pretty crisp.  They're both destined for auction, but now I'll be able to have them running at 'Mach 8' again.  Hustlers, indeed!!  What a hoot!

KD

Those old Athearn "Hi-Fi" locomotives always served me well at the Allentown train races!  0-200 in 3 seconds without the rocket motors on the top of my RDC!   Still have a few F7s and RDCs floating around somewhere.  Nice to see a source for rubber bands.

The Hustler couldn't pull more than four light weight cars, but boy could it fly!  I bought mine at a neighborhood corner store where the owner was a model railroader and had a railroad section in the store.  Hustlers were very affordable as I recall, cheap enough for an eleven year old  paper's boy income. Anyone remember what they paid for one?   And yes, I used rubber bands from my braces.

Earl