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 decade until the late 80s. With newer power available 1000 was put out to pasture and the fledgling HMLX picked her up for their lease and terminal operations.

So that in some part explains her presence on Beaverbrook in a 1990s setting… but this photo is the last you’ll see of her here for a while for she has been moved on to a short term lease with Andrews Lumber on the Pacific coast…

…in reality heading to blog regular Alan Sewell’s lumber mill layout for a few months - photos will follow. If you’d like to host her upon the completion of her work there drop me a message and we’ll see about arranging further postings…

Until next time, more soon…

Support my work

I love writing and creating material for the blog. If you enjoy what you read and engage with I would be appreciative of any donation, large or small, to help me keep it advert and restriction free. Alternatively, feel free to buy me a coffee, where regular memberships start from just £1.