Train of the Week

This week I want to direct your attention to a well preserved and fully operational Victorian railway line in the North of England. As you'd imagined, it's frequently visited by steam excursions. " Steam locomotive 60163 Tornado LNER Peppercorn A1 class Ribblehead Viaduct The waverley 3 October 2009 image 1 " by Ultra7 - Own work . Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons . I had the fortune to have traveled on this line while I last visited England and I wrote about the equipment that could be seen around this line (see my posts on the Class 158 and the Class 332/3 ). This post, however, is for the railway line itself only. " High Scale, Garsdale - geograph.org.uk - 606499 " by Don Burgess. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons . " Lunds Viaduct - geograph.org.uk - 163936 " by John Illingworth. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons . Since the Wikipedia , as well as its own dedicated website have

I dropped the ball this week huh. Anyway, I'll do a quick make up from something I've posted on the Facebook page of this blog. GO Transit in my hometown of Toronto is getting new cab cars! And this time they'll get an actual driving cab instead of a little slot with some sticks and handles for the engineperson. No more through gangways though, but when was the last time GO had to slot a cab car in between a train? I shall redirect you to a very nice blog called BlogTO, to their page on the new GO cab cars . BlogTO talks about pretty much anything Torontonian, it's a very nice site to visit for locals and tourists I think. Enjoy!

This week, I thought I'd take a bit more time to write about a high speed electric multiple unit (EMU) from the other hemisphere. To give you some very brief background, a decade or so ago, this country called China bought a whole whack of high-speed trains (among other passenger and freight equipment) from pretty much every major rail equipment manufacturer in the world (Siemens, Bombardier, Kawasaki, Alstom, and Toshiba). They didn't buy it normally though, like how one would put in a order, and a period of time later, some products would show up in shiny wraps. The Chinese bought very few finished products, but the license to use the technology and manufacture products from those companies with whatever equipment supplier they fancy. The feature rail related thingy of the week, the CRH380CL EMU, is a bit of a mash up of a lot of the aforementioned things China has bought from the Western World. “ CRH380C-6301L ”，作者 Jwjy9597 - 自己的作品 。采用 CC BY-SA 3.0 授权，来自 维基共享资源 。 “

In this really uninformative post, you'll see some pictures and perhaps a YouTube video of a locomotive that totally looks like Bender from the show Futurama . Czech Raildays 2012, ČD 754, 754 021-4 (02) “ od Radim Holiš, Wikimedia Commons. Licencováno pod CC BY-SA 3.0 cz via Wikimedia Commons . Apparently it's called the Class 754 from the Czech Railways and the Slovak Railways (or Class T 478.4 back when the two were the same country). According to Wikipedia this locomotive is nicknamed Goggles locally. 754.012, Valašské Meziříčí “ od Matijak – Vlastní dílo . Licencováno pod CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons . I don't find much detail online (well, okay, I haven't really looked hard enough this time either, but I just think it's funny to feature Bender on my blog). But you can look up the basic stuff here on Wikipedia.

This week I feel like blogging about a locomotive from a lesser-known manufacturer in this part of the world. It's especially worth mentioning that this locomotive has recently been added to DB's procurement list to power push-pull DB Region trainsets. „ Lokomotiva 109 E2 “ od Škoda Transportation – http://www.skoda.cz/cs/press-room/fotogalerie/ . Licencováno pod CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons . So the Škoda 109E locomotive, or whichever railroad classification number you may want to call it (it's aka the DB Class 102 in Germany), is quite standard in terms of her specifications go. There are four axles, each powered by a traction motor pumping out about 2 150 horsepower, and the top speed in service is 124 mph. „ Brno, hlavní nádraží, lokomotiva 380.007 (03) “ od Harold – Vlastní dílo . Licencováno pod CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons . Enjoy the pictures and the quite beautifully made YouTube video (you've gotta see this one). I actually quite like