At any given moment I have a lot of projects going. Too many. Certain things will focus me in. With the summer heat I have three final projects that have elements that need to be worked on in my garage shop, before it gets too hot to work on them early in the morning. Which has finally pushed me to make progress on a project that I’ve wanted to do for a few years, an RS-1 Diesel.

The general inspiration for this model is that the old HO AHM S-1 (the “Alco 1000”) is a close stand-in as an OO model. This I have written about a few times (here for example), it is an easy model to convert to OO operation. The basic model is not OO, but from the side in particular it is close, and overall is certainly well overscale for HO. In another article on the S-1 (2011) I mention that I’d like to make an RS-1 or a related model. The idea goes even further back than that, certainly by when I was in college I had the RS-1 in mind as being an ideal engine for my Madison-Quincy-Southern line.

It is exciting to see the model take shape now. Besides needing two of the S-1 bodies to modify, you need a workable drive. Originally, I was thinking to use six-wheel trucks (and I could still eventually switch them out), I settled instead on using the frame and drive from an Athearn GP of some sort (GP-38-2?). I will substitute appropriate Alco style side frames, which will be a bit under scale, but I think a good compromise.

Speaking of compromises, there are a lot of compromises on this model, and I don’t intend to go to major heroics to fix all of the detail errors. My hope is the eye accepts them as part of the potential modifications seen on a short line Diesel engine. But I do have a few body modifications in mind still beyond what you see now.

The body took some careful piecing together of the short hood and the frame required some rather time-consuming modifications. I would not rate this a simple conversion, but at this point it is pretty far along, an hour or two more and I will have it running. After I have that done, I will likely glue the hoods onto the plastic AHM frame, making that all one solid unit, and from there work out some method of attaching the body to the frame. Couplers will be mounted in the factory mounts.

My anticipation is that this RS-1 should fit in well with the “under scale fleet” (more here), for which I also have a couple more boxcars just completed and painted. These are the models I’m actually running on the layout the most often presently, just a little under scale as a group but operating really reliably. Relaxing to run and, as they say, “Model Railroading is Fun.” More on the rest of the conversion and how it compares to a Schorr RS-2 when the series continues ….

Continue to Part II, conclusion