I have a question for Athearn and Athearn/Bev-Bel Blue Box Kit Collectors, as follows:
Athearn Blue Box Locomotive kits, custom painted and decorated for Southern Pacific, late 1950's Holloween Paint Scheme/Pumpkins, not Tiger Strip Scheme.
Kit Number 1140-101. Bev-Bel Kit Number 1140, is a Espee Overnight XM.
Is this a Bev-Bel Number 1140-101 custom painted kit and or by another party and does anyone know?
And, these are the Kit Numbers, for the Espee aformentioned paint scheme:
Kit Number: 1140-101
Kit Number: 1140-110
Kit Number: 1140-119
The last three digits are the locomotive numbers.
Bev-Bel took Athearn stuff in the Blue Box ear and painted it into schemes that were not otherwise offered by Athearn.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
Since the kits have the dash after the main number, I think that they were probably done by Bev-Bel. I don't see why they would sell undecorated anything, and if they did I don't think they would have different ID numbers. In any case, there is a large list of Bev-Bel cars at the HOSeeker site.
Go to: http://hoseeker.org/lit.html.
Click on "Literature", then choose Bev-Bel from the list. Then click on "Bev-Bel list". The locos seem to all be listed on the higher numbered pages and I didn't see your number there. But I was not interested enough to look at all the pages.
And it is possible that your locos were made after that list was completed.
I assume you're talking about the Daylight livery. Those sound like Bev-Bel paint jobs to me. I don't ever remember seeing those in the Walthers catalog as made by Athearn, just gray with red nose livery.