Ballard and Wantage RS1…
It was all Chris’s fault. On one of our calls we had been talking about the Ballard and Wantage, Mike Confalone’s Allagash and a mutual love of Alco… Chris mentioned he’d seen an early yellow box Atlas RS1 for just £25 at Clark Railworks… So our 1000 was saved from scrap. Rescued from oblivion, repaired and repurposed. The yellow box models feature a Japanese drive and she runs beautifully but there isn’t a great deal of room under the hood but somehow I squeezed in a scrap Bachmann sound-value S4 decoder. Finally, a repaint in a faded version of the New Haven paint she arrived in, patched for the Ballard and Wantage yet tagged for HMLX and with visibility stripes added… So what’s the story? Assuming the B&W outgrew just the Wantage Terminal to operate a section of former B&M branch we needed bigger power and the New Haven RS1s were sold from the GE scrap line having been traded in for newer units. A quick patch out and numbered 1000-1002 the trio plied the rails for a decad...
