HO Lima Locomotive Works Locomotive, 1930's Appearance #1 with DCC, Sound, & Smoke

Boston and Albany A-1a & A-1b Locomotive Overview

The railroad's answer was Lima Locomotive Works. With increases in train length and faster speeds needed to meet demands, the Ohio based locomotive builder took one of their "super 2-8-2" designs for New York Central and added an additional axle to it to create the first 2-8-4 in the United States. All in all, Lima built 25 A-1a's and 20 A-1b's for the railroad in 1926 and all were scrapped between 1949 and 1957.

The A-1 featured 63-inch driving wheels, a working boiler pressure of 240 psi, and produced over 76,000 lbf of tractive effort from 28-by-30-inch cylinders. They ultimately were not suited for fast freight, but the A-1's proved to US railroads that they had a dramatic performance improvement over other steam locomotives on the line. They hauled heavier trains over the B&M's line more than an hour faster than their 2-8-2 mikados.

In the first production run of A-1a's and A-1b's, Broadway Limited is building the locomotives in several different prototypical appearances. This includes the Lima Locomotive Works #1 and the Illinois Central 7050. Broadway Limited is offering these models in both Paragon4 Sound/DC/DCC with smoke, and the Stealth Series. The Stealth series models are no-sound and DCC-ready. They come with a 21-pin decoder socket for easy decoder installation, and they come factory-equipped with an 8-ohm speaker.

All models have hand-crafted brass boilers, cabs, and tender bodies, and die-cast locomotives and tender chassis.

Industry-leading Model Features