SJ Rapidlok (Ra)

By -
Let's keep discovering some nice bulldog nose locomotives this week. There are actually in fact quite a few of them even outside of North America. Hopefully I'll be able to sniff them out one by one eventually. Anyway. You can think of this week's feature locomotive as a double ended electric F-unit. Not that the locomotive herself has anything to do with the F-unit, but to us North Americans, the F-unit is truly the bulldog nose icon.



So here we have the Ra or Rapidlok (lok: locomotive) from Sweden. Only 10 were built between 1955 and 1961 by ASEA (maker of our fast little toasters), the Ra was exclusively for (well, name has it) express passenger trains. According to the Swedish page on Wikipedia this locomotive generated quite a buzz when she debuted with her slick looks and bridge orange color scheme. In addition to their SJ road numbers, the Ra also had their own through Rapid 1 to Rapid 10. The 4 axles of the Rapidlok transfer an impressive 3,540 hp onto the rails and the locomotive has a top speed of 93 mph. The Ra has made her final revenue run in 1996 but a few are preserved and still kicking around.

Interesting looking cab

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Briefly on the AAR Coupler Part 2

By -
Image
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 Since the withdrawal of passenger service in North America by private railroads, the Type H standard is no longer maintained by the Association of American Railroads, a trade group formed of major freight railroads, but is under the control of the APTA, the American Public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
Read more

Amtrak NPCU

By -
Image
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
Read more

Bombardier IORE

By Yi -
Image
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
Read more