Atlas Wabash Train Master

I founbd this for an OK price on eBay, but unlike the other Atlas Train Masters I have, this one has been nothing but problems.

I don't know if Atlas still does this, but at least in the 1990s and 2000s, it sold its locos with side handrails installed, but the end handrails were packed separately in the box for the user to install. This was never a good solution, partly because buyers would either lose the handrails or mess them up installing them, and if other models were available to pull out from poorly supervised dealer shelves, some guys would go into the boxes and steal the end handrails from other boxes at the store, and later buyers would get those models home and discover the end handrails were missing.

If you contacted Atlas, they'd say it wasn't their fault, but they'd contact the manufacturer and have them run some extras the mext time they ran the model in four or five years, that is, if the manufacturer remembered to do it then. This was a big reason I gave up on Atlas.

This model was facrory new, the box was sealed, and the handrails were there, but they were extra-fiendish to install. The front ones fell out again as I carried this to the camera. Hope I can find them.

Now I discover that the cab isn't properly seated on the running boards. Another item to try to fix.

The PC board with the DCC socket has the wire position 4 as the only one marked -- normally 1 is marked. But OK, I mounted the plug with the black wire at position 4. When I tested it, I found that the headlghts didn't work, and the loco ran in the opposite directions for front and rear. Turns out the 4 should have been 1. I turned the plug around in the socket so the orange wire went in the position marked 4, and it ran correcrly, and the headlights worked. Luckily this was an easy fix, the others not so much.

This is why I've mostly stopped buying modcls that aren't fully assembled with decoder installed. Walthers Mainline or Proto locos with DCC and sound seem always to be quality assured and don't have all this aggravation. Granted the Atlas Train Master was released in 2004, which makes it 21 years old, but it's time for a next-generation model with high end features like ScaleTrains or Rapido.