If you go to its webshop, Ball Watch will present you with a not very digestible array of 455 SKUs across eight inscrutable collections. Buried there at the end is the Fireman collection, made up of a scant 13 timepieces. And it’s there that you’ll find the most affordable Ball Watch, the Ball Fireman Enterprise. While Ball perhaps rightly gets some criticism for its unclear provenance, as we’ve previously shared on this site, the watches it produces are well-made and often stand out from their contemporaries. The Ball Fireman Enterprise is amongst the more moderately sized models the brand offers, and while it may not have the flair of, say, the Roadmaster collection, it still serves as a solid entry-level offering.

Ball Watch traces its roots back to the late 1800s and Webb C. Ball, a pioneering American railway inspector who set timekeeping standards that would prevent railway accidents. Out of his work came Ball Watch, founded in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1891. Like most watch companies of the day, the brand made pocket watches, and in the case of Ball, pocket watches specifically made for the railroads that crisscrossed the United States, with an emphasis on precision and reliability. A lot has changed since then. The brand still touts its origin story like any brand with heritage should, but it has its official headquarters in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, while being held by a Hong Kong-based holding company. In my experience and my opinion, none of this bears on the quality of the watches themselves.

Of the multiple Ball Watches I’ve had a chance to handle, I’ve never been disappointed. Most of them have been too bulky for my liking, but the overall style and execution have always appealed. (In fact, early on in my watch collecting, I had always wanted a Marvelight III, though a chance encounter with one revealed that the size just wasn’t right.) There are a few things that define almost every Ball Watch, and I only half-joke when I say the bulky proportions are one of them. The others are the use of railway terms for collection names, tritium gas tubes where other brands would use typical luminous paint, and the fancy Double R counterbalance on the seconds hand of the watches. The brand also has a number of novel complications and useful behind-the-scenes tech that makes their watches compelling. That ranges from temperature and tide complications to patented GMT and world time functions to patented antishock and antimagnetic systems (and beyond). As with most Cost of Entry options, though, the Ball Fireman Enterprise isn’t equipped with most of the brand’s exciting features, but it still delivers on the foundational brand DNA.

The Fireman collection is a bit of an odd one within the Ball catalog, and that’s saying something considering Ball has five different Engineer collections and the Trainmaster and Official Railroad lines, the latter of which is a selection of the former’s lineup. Parsing the differences between all the Engineers or what makes a Trainmaster a Trainmaster can be a bit challenging, but what’s clear about the Fireman is that it’s the simplest line the brand offers. For the Fireman Enterprise, Classic, and Victory, you get a 40mm 316L stainless steel case (not the 904L that some Ball’s are made of, but there is a 45mm black DLC Fireman for some reason). The Enterprise is 11.3mm thick with a lug-to-lug of 47mm, plus a domed sapphire crystal and a screw-down crown that helps with the watch’s 100m water resistance.

The smaller size also owes to the lack of any extra case features. There’s no swinging crown lock, no tide bezel, and no GMT pushers. Instead, the rather svelte case has lugs that appear almost pinched and that feature circular brushing. The sparing case design, which sees lugs that mimic being individually attached, means the dimensions will be ideal for most with no extra bulk (even if 40mm is at the wider end of modern trends). On the wrist, the watch actually wears better than its dimensions would suggest, and that’s down to the lugs. Take a look at most of the watches in your collection and you’ll probably see lugs that descend to the same plane as the caseback or perhaps not even that far. In the latter case, that means a watch that perches prominently on the wrist. The Ball Fireman has lugs that descend below the caseback, giving the wrist a proper little hug for a fit that’s cozier than a crackling fire on Christmas Eve (or the penultimate night before whatever cold weather holiday you observe).

The dial on the Ball Fireman Enterprise is rather ho-hum. Offered in black or white, you’ve got the Ball logo and “Official Standard” text, plus depth and movement info at 6. The floating date window is acceptable but nothing more. It’s far more palatable on the white dial, but on the black dial it really sticks out and while it nestles a bit within the long hour markers, you get the feeling it’s about to float away. The minutes are marked by short hashes while the hours are marked by rather long tritium tubes, with the 12 o’clock marker in a contrasting orange. On the hands, you get the classic Double R counterbalance, and the dauphine hour and minute hands use the same straight tritium tubes that mark out the hours. That’s one of the shortcomings of using such tubes — they can’t do anything but be straight tubes and ruin any idea you may have of lume design. The best Ball does with this is forming Arabic numerals out of the tubes, but that’s not part of the Enterprise.

As mentioned, one of Ball Watch’s signatures is its use of tritium gas tubes instead of Super-LumiNova. While the brand does use traditional lume for its bezels, it defaults to tritium for dials and hands. The advantage of tritium is that it is always on. There’s no need for charging and the brightness is constant. You certainly lose the initial burst of brightness you get from Super-LumiNova, but the constant brightness of tritium is always sufficient to read. The same can’t always be said for the relatively quick fade of painted compounds.

The caseback on the Fireman Enterprise features a nicely rendered embossing of a train, which is fitting given the brand’s history. The screw-down caseback conceals the Ball RR1103 caliber. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is not one of the brand’s manufacture calibers nor one of its chronometer grade movements. Instead, the RR1103 is an ETA 2824/Sellita SW200 (the brand reportedly uses both and I wasn’t about to open it up to find out which). Accordingly, you’ll get a run-of-the-mill minimum power reserve of 38 hours at 28,800 vph, plus the reliability that comes with ETA/Sellita movements. One point of boasting that this watch does do is the anti-shock capacity, which measures 5,000 G. While it doesn’t appear to feature either of the brand’s patented anti-shock devices, apparently, Ball tests all of its watches to the 5,000 G standard using a pendulum impact-testing machine, which is exactly what it sounds like.

While the Fireman Enterprise may not pack the punch of the Roadmaster Ocean Explorer or an Engineer Hydrocarbon, it does offer a few hallmarks of the brand while being easier on the wrist than most other options in the catalog. In a sense, the pared-down aesthetic of the Fireman Enterprise harkens back to the simpler pocket watches with which the company got its start (though the Trainmaster collection does so more faithfully). In the end, though the quality is there for the Fireman Enterprise, unless you’re truly in love with the design, it may be worth the extra money to upgrade to one of the more exciting models.  The Ball Fireman Enterprise is priced at $1,199 USD. For more information, please visit the Ball Watch website.