Local HO Discoveries - Finding US Outline Rolling Stock Secondhand

So this week I visited the secondhand toy store in a street near me, it's a small shop with heavily shuttered windows, and from the outside it never seems to be open, but I was walking past the other day and lo and behold... the door was open.

I went inside and was confronted by the most ridiculous array of old toys and trains, piles of battered corgis and dinkys and hornby in every corner, shelves piled high with meccano and scalextric, and in the corner of the window beside all the Triang and Lima and OO wagons I found a pile of HO american trains!

This was quite a stash of HO, including some repainted Spectrum Bachmann Dash-8's and some old wide-body Athearn, nothing really that exciting, but then underneath a stack of old toy life-like wagons I unearthed a Atlas, and not just any Atlas either, this was a Norfolk Southern GP38-2, the EXACT model that I had been unsuccesfully bidding on ebay for! What are the chances of that?  Not only was there some US locomotives in this tiny shop, but there was actually the one I wanted to get.

So naturally, I bought it there and then.  It's a bit rough around the edges, some broken handrails, busted couplers and missing a horn, but it runs great and I have already got the missing parts ordered from ebay.

This is my first ever Atlas model, twenty years ago when I was collecting HO last time, my entire collection was Athearn except for a single Spectrum Switcher.  I suspect this model wasn't available then, but it's certainly a great addition to my fledgling fleet now.  The detail is amazing, including visible fan details on the roof, and an interior with crew, it has a crisper moulding detail that the Athearn, which may be because it doesn't seem to be painted, it's just a black plastic shell with printed details.

This new engine brings my roster up to three GP38-2 although one of those is the basket-case Chicago Belt locomotive that will need a lot of work to bring up to scratch.  I've been watching some replacement shells on ebay for that one as the existing shell has some damaged mounting clips.

So all this new rolling stock needs somewhere to run, and with that in mind, I've been spending a lot of time with XtrkCad working on my layout track plan.  More on that soon.