Rapido Trains UK announced their 00 Gauge USATC S160 2-8-0 back in August 2003. They have now arrived including 926004 USATC S160 No.2356 in Wartime Grey. Although technical not running on the Southern Railway during my usual 1946 to 1949 modelling period, I do sometime extend my period for and aft…
The Southern Railway only had only six of these locomotives on loan, this was due to the SR electrification scheme, meaning that the railway had a healthy surplus of steam locomotives available for wartime traffic, allowing other regions to take more S160 locomotives. They arrived on the SR relatively late, just ready for the preparations for the D-Day landings. Constructed in the United States in multiple batches from 1942 to 1945, they were split between the ALCO, Baldwin, and Lima Locomotive Works.
Collectively, almost 800 locomotives were shipped to the UK. The first 396 were assigned to the four railway companies (although under the control of the government Railway Executive Committee) locomotives passed through major workshops including those on the SR and allowed to run-in on SR metals before being dispatched to the respective railway company.
Model item number 926004 No.2356 is represented in her December 1943 condition. She was manufactured by Baldwin Locomotive Works , Philadelphia in 1943, was allocated to Exmouth Junction shed before being transferred to Germany in September 1944. The tooling variations applicable to this model includes: Standard lamp irons, straight strap smokebox door, westinghouse air pump, pipework mounted in front of chimney, straight running boards, right hand drive with pole reverser and original pattern firehole door, standard wartime tender and boiler-mounted ejector pipe fitted. Finished in light matt grey with Transportation Corps U.S.A. on tender.
I will let the pictures do the talking; however this impressive model weighs in at over 320g with die-cast parts including the, what would be fragile otherwise, running board. As the photographs show the model has a wealth of separately applied parts and pipework.
It also features, two factory-fitted speakers, one in the loco and another in the tender, dual LED firebox glow with dynamic fire draw effect, twin flywheel motor, detachable kinetic loco-to-tender electrical 10 way connection (which some have found difficult to connect but I simply held loco and tender upside-down and they clip together easily), pickups fitted on both the loco and tender and a 21-pin DCC Decoder socket.
Included within the accessory bag are the ashpan blackout guards and bufferbeam pipework which I will fit prior to some weathering.
On my initial test run it had loose cab handrail, which I simply afixed with a little glue and a slight click from the valve gear on one side, which I discovered was a slightly bent eccentric rod, but once that was straightened it ran faultlessly and powerfully handling prototypical train loads comfortably. Certainly a highly recommend model.
These models at the time of writing are available to order now at retailers such as Kernow Model Rail Centre.
