I can stop any time I want to...

 For Fathers Day, Mrs Hades and I loaded up the pups and drove to see my parents in southwest Iowa.

Our mostly annual trips out to the Midwest always include a shopping day to nearby Omaha NE and Council Bluffs IA for my mother, who doesn't really get out much because Dad doesn't get around so well any more. Mrs Hades says it's to cement her "favored daughter-in-law" position (but not in front of my brother's wife).

As is usual, whenever I am in Omaha I stop by the House of Trains located at 8106 Maple Street. I don't really need anything since my layout is 1300 miles away, and there isn't anything I can get there that I can't get at Nicks in Raleigh, but traditions are traditions and I always like to drop in to see what they have.

This year I found a Micro Trains Father's Day car, a handful of other rolling stock pieces, and a Digitrax non-sound decoder for the new CSX ES44DC that I mentioned at the end of my last post (bringing the total of modern locomotives up to seven). With that done, I then turned my attention to their scrap boxes.

House of Trains takes in quite a bit of used stuff, for trade in and I think for consignment as well. Because of that you can always find something you didn't really know you needed. The last trip it was a box of Kato Unitrack, and this time it was a first-gen Atlas/Kato RS3 in Rio Grande black-and-yellow paint.

Although the photo shows the completed loco, it originally came in kit form (meaning disassembled) in a bag marked "Parts" with a $25 price tag. When I examined the contents of the bag it looked like everything was there. The motor, trucks, driveshafts and body were present, as was the mangled remains of both frame halves, and a mess of something that appeared to be light boards and decoders. The Micro Trains coupler conversion had even been done (although the walkway was broken).

The frame had been hogged out to clear the motor contacts (that's not really the way you're supposed to do it) but it looked like it would bolt together and hold the motor securely. The decoder wires were broken off and disconnected, and upon further examination it appeared that there were two decoders in the bag, one connected to the light board and one not. Both were missing wires.

I took it back to the folks house and tested the motor with a battery, and was ecstatic to see that it actually ran. I assembled what I could of the loco, leaving the gray and orange motor wires attached (they weren't attached to a decoder, though) and once again tested it with a battery. All the running gear worked like it should with no strange noises, and the body fit on the frame with no issues other than the walkway being broken.

Then I took a look on the auction site and found that you can actually get quite a few pieces for this loco. This is somewhat surprising since this is the older pre-China Kato chassis. I found a set of frames that hadn't been butchered and put in a bid, and then I ordered a walkway from an auction site store. I won the bid and had both of them shipped home, expecting them to be there when we got back.

And they were. I assembled the loco with the new walkway, new frames, and a proper TCS CN-GP decoder and it runs just like a brand new one. But wait, there's more! It turns out there was not one, but TWO sets of frame halves in the auction, so with the extra frame in hand and an Atlas/Kato RS11 shell in a box that I had sitting around I thought I might try to build a complete running chassis for it as well (they use the same chassis, the only difference is the fuel tanks).

Motors, worm gears, and U joints can all be had on the same auction site store as the walkways, as can fuel tanks and truck frames. Amazingly enough, the truck halves and gears can be found in the Atlas catalog, as can the body shell headlight inserts and light boards. 

In fact, about the only thing that you cannot find new is the screws to hold the frame halves together (although you can get the plastic insulators and nuts, go figure) and the wheel sets. Amazon has screws that I think will work, and I was able to find a guy on one of the mailing lists who had some wheel sets laying around in a parts box.

I've ordered all the parts that I could order from Atlas and the auction site and I'm waiting for the wheel sets to show up. He didn't know how many he had, so I'm hoping at least four. If I can get wheel sets, I'll have a complete running undecorated RS11 that I have no need for (to go along with the two Life-Like GP-18 chassis with undecorated Atlas GP7 shells that I have).

And if there are more than four, maybe I can order the parts to put the mangled chassis back together, too. I won't have a shell for it, but I'll have a running chassis at least.