Atlas Classic Minneapolis & St Louis RS-1

The Atlas HO RS-1, in either its original Atlas Kato version or the made-in-China Atlas Classic version, continues to be one of my favorite locomotives. It's simple, it has a heavy chassis and a smooth running mechanism. I like to find them in the more obscure road names. I recently found a better-than-usual price on eBay for one in Minneapolis & St Louis. The M&StL disappeared in the first wave of railroad mergers around 1960, along with roads like the Virginian and the Lackawanna. The M&StL used RS-1s as both yard switchers and road switchers. Their only other road units were EMD Fs until they acquired GP9s late in the road's history.

I did some research and found that the M&StL had an almost unique number system that was based on the month and year the unit was acquired. Thus RS-1 845 was acquired in August, 1945. The only other railroad I'm aware of that used this system was the Henry Becker dairy farm railroad, the Centerville and Southwestern, a 9-7/16" guage line that operated in Roseland, NJ. This system was used on its rolling stock, but not its locomotives.

A change of management in the late 1950s led to a renumbering of M&StL's locomotives into a more typical system that put them into classes based on model.

I'm not sure when, or even whether, Atlas added an 8-pin DCC socket to this model. Even in the Atlas Classic range, most or all that I've found need to have the PC board replaced with a decoder based on the original shape and mounting method. I've settled on the Digitrax DH165A0. The advantage of these is that a resistance for LEDs is built in, so especially with the Classic version, it's possible just to bend up the leads so the LEDs face the light bars without modification and soilder them directly to the decoder as shown here.