Nice work, but unless your locos will sleep their entire life in their box, it would have been good to see without the hood how they are made. How strong. Wich differences are they mechanically and with a test run under heavy load. Those things are far to costly to stay in their box in a closet.

Why is it every one of you comparing "decoders" instead of the model itself? - I really want to know which one of these models is the quietest and smooth running. I can see the details are very close to each other between Scaletrains/Intermountain/MTH/Genesis/ECT

The scale trains lifting rings are present, just a different type. I have Athearn 977 and 5127 and they have different details which do correspond to pictures of the real locomotives. The ditch light housings are the same ones Athearn uses for their GEVOS and are made to fit the light bulbs Athearn WAS using before switching over to LEDs.

Great informative video of both the Scale Trains & the Athearn BNSF dash 9’s. I model N scale & have Kato locomotives that work great & in the process of gradually building my freight locomotive fleet of Santa Fe & Southern Pacific for my N scale Pacific West Coast model railroad. My N scale Southern Pacific bay window cabooses are Athearn. In the future I will be adding BNSF & Burlington Northern locomotives to my locomotive fleet.

Great video and comparison!

Appreciate the comparison of these two locomotives - both are nicely detailed with few significant differences. You're right about the missing grabs behind the conductor's side of the cab on the Scale Trains example. One other small issue: the yellow striping on the Scale Trains locomotive should be segmented in various places, especially under the cab (appears correct on the Athearn model). 4519 was initially painted in the Heritage II scheme; the segmented striping continued with the repaint to Heritage III. It might also be noted the filter grills behind the conductor's side of the cab can vary in size, shape and location from one Dash 9 to the next, depending on what hardware happens to be available.

Who's copying who ? Very high quality on both Locos . 🇺🇸

Nice comparison on these two beauties! Hey by the way, if want a prototype photo of BNSF 4519 to examine, I have one that I took last year uploaded on my Facebook page (it's not the greatest of angles though) as well as a H2 Dash 9!

I always find the number boards on the Scaletrains are not fully seated right . Their always leaning one way or another.

Take away is use Scaletrains drive with Athearn shell,,Scaletrains is nice and detailed but everything seems to be thrown together Athearn lacks super nice drive like Scaletrains have but details seem to be nicely added to shell

You said you thought the one side (right side) was the engineer side, wrong the left side is engineer side. The right side is where the conductor sits and brakeman if there is one on the train.

Same model but the BNSF logos are different.

In reality these appear from your review to be almost identical, but you didn't mention pricing.

can you please put the weight and pulling power for both of them?

The st cab is better shaped as well.

Watched it for 30 seconds or so, if you weren’t saying “uh and umm” so often, I’d continue to watch.

Customer service, ScaleTrains blows Athearn away. My Athearn came without its numberboards, just completely missing. They more or less told me too bad. Send it back where I bought it if I wasn't happy. I'll stick with ScaleTrains.

Prime example of Hobby destroyer. We have to pay ridonkulous prices for Loco's because this is what they worry about. I'll bet, just a guess that either of these 2units will run on the layout and pull loads with no issue. The only true thing to be concerned with.

So u going to run both of locomotives

Like both of them! I am not a fan of BNSF!

I read st guys used to work at athearn. Both models look same to me. Seems st is probably better from all reviews I see.

ScaleTrains runs much quieter than Athearn (even the Genesis models). Also they come with capacitors installed. Those two factors put them way above Athearn for me.

The Athearn windshields are very noticeably too small. ST did a better job overall.

I'll take Scaletrains over Athearn's overpriced crap any day of the week. They run better, are much better on details and cost almost $100 less. And given all the problems I've had with Athearn's junk in the past both with their Genesis and RTR stuff, I'll never buy their locomotives again. I just posted a video concerning yet another problem encountered with a brand new RTR Conrail SD60 that's about to get relegated to dummy/display status due to a faulty motor.

I would recommend ScaleTrains tho

The Athearn Genesis can not pull as much as the scale trains. & All the lights are not there but SC also has no step lights!! The electric pick up on SC sucks. I have no problems with Genesis. I already broke one dash 9 cleaning the trucks. They are even cheaper then the way MTH made them. To clean gearboxes/wheels on SC you have to desolder the truck from the board. Seperate the clips from the gear box. Slide out the side frames. Then you can get the the little cheap strip of copper these Chinese slave laborers give us? Holding out on SC. Athearn been in the games for 25 years.