The Rapido CP FA-2

As I get older, it's harder to work with things like small screws, and finding places to put each new purchase gets harder and harder as well. Thus I'm tending to spend more money on locos that are ready to run with DCC and sound, while buying fewer things overall. As part of this policy, I recently got a Rapido CP Rail FA-2. Here's the result.

When I was a lot younger, I spent some time in northern New Hampshire. I was supposed to be in school, but the lucky part was that I got to railfan Canadian Pacific, Canadian National, Boston & Maine, and Central Vermont. I was in walking distance of White River Junction, and for a while, I had a view of the B&M line across the Connecticut River, where CP ran trackage-rights freights down from Newport, VT. Just about any power on the CP in eastern Canada could turn up on these, including the FA-2s. As it now turns out, without meaning to, I've collected enough CP units to run such a train on my layout.

Once I got this unit out of the box, I was struck by the level of extremely fine detail. Even in my best prototype modeler days, I would have been hard pressed to do such neat work, with such a smooth and even paint job.

One tthing that's in fact changed from the prototype modeler era of the hobby in the 1980s and 1990s is that back then, modelers would get a bluebox or comparable model from Atlas or Walthers and then spend quite a bit on detail parts. The cost of these added up quickly. You could easily spend $1-200 on these alone, leaving aside a can motor and other drive train improvements, on a DC loco. I'm starting to realize that a modeler 30 or 40 years ago would spend an amount then comparable to a high-end model with sound and DCC now, but that modeler then would only be starting a big, expensive project he might never complete.

At my stage, I'm delighted to get a ready to run model at a level I never would have thought possible.