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 put and numbered 1000-1002 the trio plied the rails for a decade until the…