Introduction

I think that the RDC is a great addition to any layout. For those who model passenger operations anywhere from the late 1950s on, these little beauties fit right in. I believe that even in the USA they’re mostly gone now from day-to-day service.

Rapido’s new RDC-1

Thankfully they’re going to be remade by Rapido. And the work they put into this is amazing. Apparently they’ve scanned the real thing, and then worked off the scans and the blueprints to decide what was as-built, and what was in-service.

These cars also ran as is here in Australia. The Commonwealth Railways bought three of them for service in South Australia. I believe that ComEng (Commonwealth Engineering – Granville NSW) also built a set or two under license for use on the South Coast Daylight trains running from Sydney to Bombaderry (Nowra) and return daily but they never worked right for the NSWGR.

Eventually they had the motors pulled and became loco hauled (which is how I remember them in my youth on runs down the coast).

In chugging around their site I noticed that Rapido will produce units that are painted but unlettered. Hopefully this gets some of the Australian modellers interested.

They’re not cheap at CN$325 (especially with our rapidly sinking currency), however, I just checked and the Canadian Dollar is worth slightly less than ours at the moment (0.97 as of writing) so with shipping I’d expect landed costs to be under AU$375 mark..

Resources

The product information page: http://www.rapidotrains.com/rdc1.html

The versions page showing all the versions being produced: http://www.rapidotrains.com/rdcus.html