Atlas releases N scale MR&T GP38-2 locomotives with ESU sound
Atlas turned the MR&T’s blue-and-white GP38-2 into an N scale Gold Series release, and Road No. 719 is already backordered at $234.95.
Atlas did not just ship another N scale GP38-2. It put the Milwaukee, Racine & Troy, the Model Railroader house railroad that readers have followed for decades, onto a home layout in Atlas quality, with ESU sound and a Phase II prototype underneath the paint. The Trains.com Store listing for Road No. 719 prices the locomotive at $234.95, calls it a Gold Series model, and says it is backordered until stock returns.
The biggest visual cue is the MR&T’s Amtrak Blue and Reefer White scheme, the same colors Cody Grivno says were used from 1989 to 2003. That matters because this is not a random freelance paint job. When Grivno compiled the MR&T diesel roster for the 2020 special issue Milwaukee, Racine & Troy: The inside story of Model Railroader’s club layout, he confirmed HO-scale versions of GP38-2 No. 719, SD40-2s 1000, 1002 and 1009, plus BQ23-7 No. 601. He later revived the blue-and-white look for a heritage fleet that also included GE Dash 8-40B No. 1101. The new N scale release extends that lineage instead of inventing a new one.
Atlas dressed the model with the kind of hardware that separates a serious release from a generic road-name run. The GP38-2 carries a Scale Speed motor, golden-white LED headlights, an ESU LokSound decoder, body-mounted Accumate couplers, front and rear snow plows, factory-printed front and rear number boards, builder’s plates on the sills, and a multi-piece plastic shell with a mix of freestanding and molded details. The locomotive is based on Atlas’s former Walthers, and before that Life-Like, tooling that Atlas acquired in 2018. That tooling traces back to EMD’s GP38-2, a 2,000-hp diesel built from January 1972 through July 1986, with more than 2,200 produced.
For collectors of magazine history, Milwaukee Road-adjacent fans, and operators who simply want a GP38-2 that will earn its keep, this one has a sharper angle than a standard road-name release. The MR&T began as a concept in Kalmbach Media’s downtown Milwaukee offices in 1975, grew into a 28 x 54-foot HO scale staff layout with about 200 feet of mainline, and celebrated its 35th anniversary in 2024. Putting that railroad into N scale gives the insider connection real shelf appeal, but it also gives the model a job to do on a layout. That is what makes Road No. 719 stand out: it is a working GP38-2 with a piece of Model Railroader history built into the sides.
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