British Rail Class 332/3

By -
I'm sure the excitement of riding some new unknown equipment for the first time lingers in a railfan's heart for a long time. I knew nothing about this EMU at the time I first stepped onto it at Heathrow Airport in the summer 2009, except that the conductor told me we could ONLY do 100 mph. It was a smooth ride to London Paddington, with the gentle whine of electrical wizardry at the helm and blurry scenery rushing by. 100 mph seemed like a hell of a deal for trains where I come from, but here the word "only" went ahead of it. The avid trainspotters of course know it by now, I'm talking about, the Class 332 used in the Heathrow Express service.

Class 332 in Heathrow Express Service at London Paddington
Then there's the Class 333, roaming the gentle landscape of West Yorkshire, far away from London. They are mechanically very similar if not identical to the Class 332 but have an entirely different interior layout. The Class 333 are used in regional commuter service rather than as a premium non-stop express shuttle. They are operated by Northern and can be seen around Leeds. Indeed the service I rode on a later trip to the UK, from Leeds to Carlisle via the Settle Carlisle Railway, had passed many of the Class 333 by.

Class 333 operated by Northern
The Class 332/3 are said, according to Wikipedia, to be built by CAF and Siemens in Spain. The Class 332s were built earlier in the late 1990s, while the Class 333 were built in 2000. The Class 332 can be found in either 4- or 5-car sets, while the Class 333 only come in 4-car consist. Combined, one set will put out 1 900 horsepower onto the rails.


Pictures and videos courtesy of Wikipedia Commons and YouTube (the video is really more about the Heathrow Express Service than the Class 332 EMU...).

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