Dont wait....

 Hi folks. Most of us have at some point in the hobby experienced buyers remorse and the opposite which is where we see something we like and wait or put off till tomorrow to buy and then poof -its gone.. Well I don't know about you, but as far as the latter I have experience it many tines. For some time now, I have wanted to purchase an Atlas Classic GP7 in the Bangor and Aroostook scheme. Recently there have been several releases by different manufacturers of Bangor and Aroostook GP7's , but they have all been in the Railroads newer Orange, Blue, and Grey scheme. I wanted the older Dark Blue and Grey scheme which I liked better - looks classy to me. Well to that end, Its been probably approx. 15 years since this was last done by Atlas. I saw one about a year ago that looked in "as new condition" but I hesitated  and then you know what happened - poof! So for the last year or so, I have been keeping my eyes open on eBay, and various on line second hand dealers. About 2 weeks ago , late one evening I was on the following site:

Model Train Market | Buy Model Trains Online - Railroad Accessories and Train Stuff

 and there was not one , but 4 listed. 2 were the older Atlas/ Kato variety , 1 was an Atlas classic that had a dcc (only) decoder in it ( the handrails were broken in the pictures ( I suspect this was done by the previous owner while converting to DCC as the handrails on these are fragile)) and lastly there was an Atlas Classic that was DC only and in the pictures all the handrails were still in tack. I immediately ordered the last one. I did not hesitate and I am glad I did not - I checked back the next day and both the Atlas/Kato ones were gone and a couple days later the one with the broken handrails was no longer there - poof all of them gone!!!. So yesterday the postman arrived and I immediately opened the box and did an inspection - I believe I lucked out in acting as quickly as I did - although the model came with no box (grrrrrr), when inspected there were no broken parts - the end handrails were still in the small factory sealed packet and the wheels looked to have virtually no wear. I think I got the best one of the bunch. I checked it out on a piece of flex track hooked up to my old Tech 2  2400 power pack and it ran flawlessly - yeah!. I swapped out the Accumate couplers for Kadee Scale Head # 158's. The loco will be converted in the future to sound - another sound project for my list.....so moral of the story is don't wait - if you see something appealing so are 100 other modelers.

BAR GP7

BAR GP7

BAR GP7