When the D&H started to rehabilitate Colonie shops, the small pile of abandoned equipment (D&H RS-3’s 4082 & 4126, D&H S2 2011, LIRR S1 417, and WM FA-2 302) tucked away next to the mainline became a increasing irritant. In 2007, the owners of these units were told that they had to move them or they’d be repossessed for scrap.

After negotiations, the FA-2 was made railroad legal and shipped off to be rebuilt in Maryland, but the owners of the other 4 units were unable to do anything except beg for more time, which didn’t happen.

So those four were repossessed for scrap, but not as scrap metal, but as hulks to be shipped up to St-Jean-Sur-Richelieu for repair and/or parts salvage.

One of the RS-3s was in particularly sorry shape, because it and the S2 had been visited by someone with a cutting torch who lopped off the couplers as a souvenir. So the TdM shops sent down a crew to inspect the carcasses and figure out how to ship them up north.

At which point they discovered that “sorry shape” was possibly an understatement. The 244’s were junk, and pretty much all of the electrical system above the running board had been ruined by too many years of exposure. So a railroad crane needed to come in to help gut the units, then lift the carbodies and trucks onto flatcars to ship up to the locomotive spa in St-Jean-Sur-Richelieu.

The S-1 & S-2 carcasses were shoved into the storage/scrap track for remanufacturing (where they lingered until the plague of 2019, and then became ILW shop switchers C (for St-Jean-Sur-Richelieu) and D (for Schenectady)) but the RS-3s were immediately remanufactured with RS-32-style cabs & short hoods and the long hood raised about 6 inches so that a Tier 3 Cummins QSK50 and an AC drivetrain could be installed.

The official model name for these is the eco-a419m (four-axles, 1900 horsepower, and remanufactured) but everyone at ILW – including the sales department – were calling them RS-350s before the first one was handed over to the D&H.

Both of them are in service.

In 2019, another carcass came to ILW for rebuild: Cape Cod Central #1201 – a DeWitt shops rebuild of a NYC RS-3 – came with the purchase of the Massachusetts Coastal Railroad after being taken off the CCCL’s roster in 2011, then left on a siding outside of Hyannis (“for sentimental reasons” – the judgement of death for far too many pieces of railroad equipment, but thankfully not in this case) for 8 long years before the SLR took control of the railroad.

The stacks were capped for that time, so the 567 was still operable, but nevertheless out it went – replaced by a new Cummins QSK50 and an ac drivetrain – as the engine was rebuilt into another eco-a419 (ILW had started officially calling them “RS-350"s in an attempt to make these rebuilds more attractive to shortlines & museums that were getting distressed by the definitely non EPA conformant 244s inside their Alcos, and not because everyone at ILW was calling them that despite pro-forma objections from the sales department.)

1342 is a Tier 4 unit, because the crunch of emissions standards meant that ILW couldn’t sell Tier 3 units into the USA anymore.

Finally, in 2022, the Danbury Railroad Museum gave the PV&T a collection of abandoned equipment in exchange for just getting it off Beacon Island before the Port of Albany redeveloped it (this (junk) equipment was dumped there after being abandoned by the NRHS’s infamous Mohawk Chapter before it disintegrated, was then given to Danbury, which then gave it to the D&H if they’d only get them out of Danbury’s hair.)

One of those pieces of junk was Amtrak RS-3 #126 (the reason the D&H offered to take this equipment), which was dismantled and taken to ILW’s Schenectady assembly plant, which then rebuilt the parts into a new RS-350 for the OSW. (Sadly, the only other piece of equipment that was saved was ex-NYC U25B #2510, which had been badly hit by souvenir hunters and now sits in the Schenectady dead line waiting for remanufacture. The rest of the equipment – 4 passenger cars – were scrapped to help pay for moving the Alco & GE locomotives.)

In February 2023 this locomotive was shipped to the OSW, and it is currently operating on the ex-Guelph & Goderich lines NW of Toronto.