The Queensland RailTilt Train is a narrow gage (3 ft. 6 in.) tilting train from the State of Queensland in Australia. Two sets of the Tilt Trains are manufactured and 3 sets are still in service today. The Tilt Train comes in 2 flavors. The electric version is an Electric Multiple Unit and is built by Hitachi; the diesel version is a push-pull trainset with locomotives on either end built by EDI Rail of Australia using EMD technology.
The push-pull diesel Tilt Train
The electric Tilt Train
Despite the fact that the Tilt Train runs on narrow gage track, the electric Tilt Train is still the fastest train in Australia. It is the Australian speed record holder with a top speed of 130 mph. The top speed in service of the Tilt Train is 99 mph, same as that of the standard gage XPT from New South Wales. Enjoy this short little documentary on the Tilt Train.
Last week, we've identified the Janney coupler and briefly looked at its elegant design. This week, let's, again, very briefly, look at the different types of Janney coupler that are widely used today. I will only talk about the head of the coupler, and ignore anything that the general public may need to trespass onto railroad property and get in a unsafe situation in order to have a good look at. As far as coupler heads are concerned, there are 3 types in used today. Type E, F, and H. Types E and F are used on freight, and H used on passenger equipment. Since the withdrawal of passenger service in North America by private railroads, the Type H standard is no longer maintained by the Association of American Railroads, a trade group formed of major freight railroads, but is under the control of the APTA, the American Public Transportation Association. Now let me introduce another term, slack. Slack is an allowed gap between two coupled up couplers. In other words, when most
The NPCU or Non-powered Control Units are control cars used by Amtrak that are modified from surplus EMD F40PH locomotives. A control car is a generic term for a non-powered railroad vehicle that can control operation of a train from the end opposite to the position of the locomotive. They can be used with diesel or electric motive power, allowing push-pull operation without the use of an additional locomotive. Control cars first appeared in the USA and France in 1960s. Trains operating with a locomotive at one end and a control car at the other do not require the locomotive to run around to the opposite end of the train when reversing direction. In the United States, most control cars are modified from retired locomotives by removing tractive equipment and adding side baggage doors and have been used on several passenger railroads. The control cars are connected through the consist of the train by standard AAR 27-wire multiple unit jumper cables. The NPCUs at Amtrak are a
For the readers who missed the posts in the past two weeks, we talked about the 110 mph General Electric diesel-electric locomotive P42DC Genesis (link here ) and once the flagship transcontinental passenger train of the Canadian Pacific Railway The Canadian (link here ). Let's take a break from passenger equipments and look at a very powerful freight locomotive this week. The Bombardier IORE is a 12-axle twin-section electric locomotive designed exclusively for LKAB (Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag), a Swedish mining company, to haul heavy (8,000 metric tonnes) iron ore trains (hence the name IORE) at 60 km/h (37 mph) in extreme Nordic weather conditions of northern Sweden and Norway. It was first commissioned in Year 2000. The IORE, or TRAXX H80AC, is an AC-propulsion locomotive that belongs in the TRAXX family of Bombardier locomotives. The top speed of the IORE is 80 km/h (50 mph). The IORE uses 12 electric motors to power its axles (i.e. one motor per axle), t
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