My favorite diesel, and the most numerous first gen diesel on teh Reading. I had two previously that were projects in progress, both undecorated, an MDC with the P2K drive and an Atlas Classic, but I FINALLY found one of the Atheran ones already in Reading paint on eBay. Got it cheap cheap cheap, but it's a bit of a fixer-upper. Only thing REALLY wrong is that the horn is missing, no biggy because I can get a DW or DA or one of the detail company's horns to replace it. Some of the yellow on the handrails has flaked off, which is pretty much par for the course anyway - at least they bothered to do this, unlike P2K. Runs great on my 3' piece of flex track on address 0 fro my Zephyr, except one of the light bulbs is burned out. I need to figure out who's lenses fit in the headlight castings (MV or some others) so I can repalce the dual bulbs at each end with a single LED when I put a decoder in. The MDC kit I was workign on, I got MV twin headlights to repalce the single large as well as their lenses.
It's also obvious that the Atheran ones indeed are upgrades from the MDC castings - the cab castign in particular is exactly the same, down to the bump fromt he sprue in the middle top of the roof. On my MDC one I had sanded like crazy to smooth that out and make it less noticeable, it's very obvious on the Athearn. All in all though, I'm pleased - plus I liek to think I had somethign to do with havign this made. At the Philly NMRA convention and show I talked to an Athearn rep and suggested they do the RS-3 in Reading as-delivered because no one else had done so, and the RS-3 was the most numerous model diesel on the Reading. I also mentioned about making the vertical handrails yellow. The rep took this all down, and darn if they later didn;t announce the Reading ones. By the time they came out though, I was temporarily out of the hobby and quite broke. I've been looking for one or more of them ever since. Too bad it wasn't new in box, but for 1/4 the original price I can replace a horn and reattach the loose handrails.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
Hmm, maybe I'll keep the light bulbs, they work just fine. Wierd one on the rear (front by Atheran's reckoning, but Reading ran these long hood forward) does not light with the dummy plug in on address 0, but both of the front ones work. I dropped a TCS T-1 in and all 4 builbs work fine. I see some tweakign is in order as the power pickup is very spotty. Same old Blue box design with the bolster being one side of the truck pickup - kind of disappointing given the price of these things. Looks like I will be adding a wire pickup for the second rail.
And yes, it's wired backwards, had to add 1 to CV29 to flip it around to run the right way. Otherwise, detail is great. handrails are very fragile, gonna have to be careful picking this up. Hard to even just pick it up by the trucks because of the extra details there.
I've got thirty RS-3s in various roadnames in my loco fleet. About half are Atlas and the other half are Athearn. The Atlas locos have the superior drive train while the Athearns have nicer shells.
Hi Randy,
I just took delivery of an Athearn RTR RS-3 with sound added from Tony's. It was decorated for the local short line so I was really excited. It came in a lot of road names but I can't remember them.
Bob
Don't Ever Give Up
I've got a Proto RSC-3 from Proto. That configuration has 6-wheel trucks. They built these to serve on lines where the track wasn't as robust as Class 1, and they needed to spread the weight of the engine over more wheels.
I think the early Alco RS design is one of the most appealing diesels I've ever seen.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
According to the diesel gurus on several "serious"modeling forums/yahoo groups the Athearn RS3 has the most accurate body of any available RS3..
Larry
Conductor.
Summerset Ry.
"Stay Alert, Don't get hurt Safety First!"
I guessit depends on exactly what you ar emodelling, as these have the crosswise stack so if you want to model the updated water-cooled turbo there's a bit of shaving to do. And in pictures at lot had some sort of extra pipe added to the engineer's side next to the generator vent, which I'm told is a crankcase vent.
Actually, it's pretty much the same as the MDC bodies with the addition of a visible fan in the radiator and finer handrails. The Atlas shells seem to have a huge radiator shutter actuator, and they model that extra crankcase vent pipe as a big bulge on the side.
At any rate, I'm happy with it, just need to fix the power pickup issue.