Train of the Week

Back in the days before General Electric got big into building locomotives, there was this famous company called American Locomotive Company, or Alco. Similar to today's major builders, their locomotive also sold across the globe. Right, my title gave it away. This post is about an Indian locomotive designed and first by Alco in 1962. Starting in 1964, India produced this locomotive domestically at the Indian Railways' very own Diesel Locomotive Works. " Indian diesel loco WDM2 " by Miya.m - Miya.m's file. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons . Started life as the DL560C, 40 units of this Alco and 40 EMD SD24 were produced in America and shipped to India for trials. Compared to the SD24, the DL560C was deemed more reliable and rugged. With the added benefit of a technology transfer agreement from Alco for domestic production and simple maintenance, India went big on the DL560C, known there as the WDM-2 (wide gauge, diesel, mixed use). More than ...

Well, the term "new line" is used loosely here, it's really a new extension. But, good news! The Hokuriku Shinkansen extension to Kanazawa is finally open for business as of this month, cutting the journey time between Tokyo and the City of Toyama on the other side of the Honshu Island by 2 hours. I will use some pictures to do the talking this week, because my level of knowledge of Japanese high speed railways is relatively bare (although probably better than the average Joe). This map below shows what's up with post. " Hokuriku Shinkansen map " by Hisagi ( 氷鷺 ) - Own work . Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons . Since the Hokuriku Shinkansen goes through some quite mountainous terrain, a lot of tunnels and viaducts have to be deployed, and the trains can't go crazy fast like some of the flatter areas. Series E2 , E7/W7 are currently operating services on this line. They operate up to a, still very respectable, top speed of 260 km...

So remember two weeks ago I posted about the German-Chinese electric passenger locomotive that's based on the Siemens EuroSprinter? Well, this week I'm going to post about a cousin of hers, another German-Chinese locomotive that's based on the Bombardier Traxx series, a family of locomotives also vastly popular in Continental Europe. Not too bad looking heh Oh, by the way, before I write any further, the naming convention that's worked thus far with new Chinese locomotives built from imported technology goes like so: HXD + digit + letter. HXD for electric locomotives, 1 denotes Siemens EuroSprinter; 2 denotes Alstom Prima; 3 is a little iffy. The very first HXD3 is a Toshiba, but the subsequent ones are apparently all Bombardier Traxx as far as I can tell. The last letter obviously just denotes the variant of the family. The whole scheme isn't entirely too confusing. As far as specifications go, the HXD3D is pretty much identical with the HXD1D. Both locomot...

This is a brief one again but it kind of has gone under my nose undetected until not long ago. Did you know that the Turkish State Railways also bought the Siemens Velaro D (well, it's called the Velaro TR in this case) and it went in service in 2014? I didn't, until maybe a month or two ago when I accidentally stumbled upon this video of it on YouTube (this one I'm posting here below). I gotta say that's a very nice color scheme for the train and North America is pretty much officially the third world of passenger rail travel... it makes me a little sad to think about this latter thing.