Train of the Week

So this week we'll go across the Pacific instead and have a look at a passenger locomotive developed by the Chinese that's based on a popular Germany family of locomotives. China has apparently bought the technology to Siemens EuroSprinter and Bombardier TRAXX along with thousands of heavy-haul freight locomotives from Germany and they have been busy developing with the technology ever since. Is it just me or does it look German? So this locomotive, the HXD1D is a 6-axle locomotive designed to haul long distance passenger trains on China's existing railroad network (I'm guessing since Chinese passenger trains are long, around 20 cars, they need a bit of tractive effort with all the available horsepower and hence 6 axles). The latest government directive apparently dropped the maximum operating speed on existing railroads from 124 mph (or 200 km/h) down to 99 mph (160 km/h) and that's how fast this locomotive is supposed to go. Interestingly the locomotive ...

Okay, I'm gonna be really lazy this week. But I found the English version of the ICx promotional video on YouTube! It probably wasn't hard to find at all but I still just never realized it was there until now. Embedding is disabled on it however, so I'll have to use the new school way of including YouTube videos which may not work with mobile users. Here's the link to the video if the little preview frame below doesn't show up somehow.

This week, I'll pick up from  where I've previously left off on the showcase for locomotives we, North American railfans, may not realize that we already know. These are primarily EMD locomotives built by foreign builders under license. Some of them we might recognize from their styling, some we could not dare to guess. So if you haven't heard of this locomotive already, let me introduce you the Swedish built Danish EMD diesel-electric locomotive, the DSB Class MZ, known to EMD as the J30C-2. Can't really say there's too much of the GM resemblance is there? Unfortunately I couldn't find much info in any language on the web (thank Google Translate for when I can), this will be one of those brief posts. However we do know that there are 4 variants of the Class MZ simply denoted by I to IV. They were built chronologically over a period of approximately 11 years from 1967 (around the time of the famous SD40). One would imagine that some of the evolut...

Transit news! The Ontario city of Ottawa has unveiled the LRV to be operated on their first ever LRT line, and it's an Alstom Citadis . The LRT line, Confederation Line , will open in 2017, in time for the 150th anniversary of Canada's Confederation. The New York State thanks Ottawa for the jobs created as a result of this order. Based on some web search, there are a few dozens of variants of the Citadis operating in piles of cities around the world. There is a nice little video made up by Alstom too that provides quite some good information on the Ottawa LRV. I guess I'll leave most of this post to that.