This Space for Rent

Nostalgia (on the cheap)

One that got away

A slide (purchased for $5.50) of 578 sitting on the (now vanished) ready tracks by the (now vanished) roundhouse in North La Crosse. This is one of the locomotives that made me a lifelong Alco fan (576,577,578 with a honorable mention to 594 – the last RSC2 built.)

The Milwaukee Road retired all of their Alcos in the mid-to-late 1970s, but 578 and 594 escaped the breakers then and ended up in, respectively, the hands of a collector and the Mid-Continent Railway Museum. Sadly, 35 or so years after it escaped the breakers, the 578 was cut up after it was vandalised in the early 2010s, so my lottery dreams of buying it, shipping it to Portland, and seeing if I could convince one of the local shortlines or Class 2 railroads to operate it will never happen. But I’ll have this slide, and it will encourage me to kitbash one of the RSC2 models I’ve got into its first-and-a-half generation guise as a RSC2m (or RSC2 u, or RSC2.5, depending on which railfan you talk to) so I can have it kicking around with my various PV&T electrics as I slide inevitably into old age.