The classic Checker Marathon was produced from 1956 to 1982 essentially unchanged, according to some sources. The exterior did not change much. The motor did.
Don't forget that there was a "civilian" version of the car, sold by Checker. My grandmother had a friend who drove a Checker, and it was not a used taxi but a new car. I think she liked the height of the car -- no bending to get in or out -- although I remember my dad wondering how this little old lady could drive this huge automobile which to my recollection did not have power steering and possibly not power brakes either. Nor do I recall that car having seat belts. I bet it had a better heating system for back seats than most cars did then. There was something about the windshield wipers on that car that fascinated me as a boy -- different in some way than our car -- but I can simply no longer recall what it was. And the dashboard looked very different from our cars too.
Back then the price of gas was not much of a consideration when people bought cars. I have to think the gas milage was awful.
What I do not know is just where you would have gone to buy a Marathon. I do not think Checker had dealers.
The other advantage to a Checker from a passenger car standpoint -- and with so few rear wheel drive cars around these days people forget what this was like -- was the almost complete elimination of the "hump" in the middle in both the front and back of the car due to the height of the car Back in the day a so called 6 passenger car was wide enough but the poor person in the middle had to contend with the huge hump. Almost as bad as the rear wheel well on a school bus.
So if Athearn offers this in "normal" car colors (I seem to recall my grandmother's friend's car was tan but we are talking circa 1960 here and memories get unreliable) and you model that era, get one in civilian colors too. Make the driver a lady wearing gloves, with blue hair -- another indicia of the past that seems to have gone away. The 5 passengers can all be blue haired ladies too. And all would be wearing gloves and hats.
Dave Nelson
It is supposed to be officially announced in mid-February. I assume availability will be sometime this summer, but we won't know for sure until the official announcement.
The A8 with the single headlights, which is the version modeled by Athearn, was introduced on January 26, 1956 and was replaced in 1958 by an updated version with quad headlights and a new grille. The quad-headlamp version is the one that remained in production until 1982.
The prototype of the Athearn model was never offered as a civilian sedan as Checker did not offer a consumer car until late 1959 when it introduced the 1960 Superba that was followed by the Marathon.
However, as a taxicab, the Athearn model will be valid for layouts set set from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s or even early 1970s. Checkers lasted for years. In fact, the last Checker cab in NYC taxi service was a 1978 A8 that had clocked up nearly a million miles when it was retired in 1999.
Bill C.
More than you wanted to know about the Checker Motor Co.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_Motors_Corporation
Rotor
Jake: How often does the train go by? Elwood: So often you won't even notice ...