Train of the Week

At some point in the past, as I was daydreaming about the Scandinavian skies, I wrote about the Alstom Coradia Nordic . They became quite active in the snowy north, having replaced a variety of vintage rolling stocks across a wide spectrum of services. Little did I know. They had cousins, the Coradia Continental, who made their way south to Germany. Some of them even settled right in my current backyard, humbly serving on the busy S-Bahn Rhein-Ruhr. Von Muellean in der Wikipedia auf Deutsch (Andreas Müller) - Eigenes Werk des ursprünglichen Hochladers, CC BY-SA 3.0 de , Link Von IPRobin - Eigenes Werk , CC-BY-SA 4.0 , Link These electric multiple-units are known as the Class 440 (newer versions are called the Class 1440). They had been roaming far and wide in the Vaterland since the late 2000s. Having a top authorized speed of 100 mph, these trainsets not only could operate in frequent-stop suburban commutes, they are fully capable of running as RegionalBahn or RegionalExpre...

The IC2 is still considered a rare sight by me, unless I camp outside a station where they stop. They are meant to be a kind of an intermediary solution to lines where the maximum authorized speed does not warrant the use of one of the shiny new ICE4 s that are to replace some existing InterCity trains. Essentially, the IC2 is an upgraded RegionalExpress Twindexx Vario trainset with an inverted long-distance colour scheme. They even have the same Class 146 locomotives on one end. As such, they do not come equipped with a bistro car. Food and beverages are served from trolleys, airline style (and maybe some people would rather prefer not to leave their seat). Von Falk2 - Eigenes Werk , CC-BY-SA 4.0 , Link The speed of these trainsets remains the same as their regional cousins, at 99 mph, down from 124 mph with the regular InterCity services. More sets will gradually come online throughout the next few years, as Bombardier irons some bugs out in the meantime (read more here on ...

Beautifully made videos by  TheKnaeggebrot  in stunning Southern Bavaria Aha, it's that time of the week, and I haven't forgotten about this blog this time around (which is a little sad, really). Let me bring your attention to the DB Class 111 , another locomotive from the Deutsche Bundesbahn days. It seems to be making a comeback? (Not sure if that's really the case, but there seems to be more and more of them on RegionalExpress trains around the area I live in, and even on some S-Bahn trains). By Lars Steffens - Flickr : Baureihe 111 , CC BY-SA 2.0 , Link Built from the mid-70s, throughout to the mid-80s, the Class 111 was originally designed for regional trains and the then new S-Bahn Rhein-Ruhr. Capability for InterCity service was added in the early 1980s, with an increase of maximum permissible speed from 93 to 100 mph. Like many locomotives of the same era, the Class 111 was built by a consortium of builders, consisting of Krauss-Maffei, Henschel, Krupp, S...

The Class 120 is an inconspicuous looking locomotive (in today's standard, anyway). It occasionally, casually drifts across the rails right in front of my eyes, almost blending into the background, hardly noticeable at all. I would've probably have never thought much of it, until now. The amount of information the English Wikipedia page has provided is a bit of a pity. Luckily, though, it is 2017, and there's Google Translate (well, hopefully at least one version of me in some alternate universe is actually learning German). There is no way this post can contain (nor should it) all the wealth of information found on the locomotive's German Wikipedia page. Here, I'll just show off a few what I think are highlights. Von Benedikt Dohmen ( User:Benedictus ), Archiv-Nr. 63/28 - Eigenes Werk , CC BY-SA 3.0 , Link So beneath the underwhelming looks of the Class 120 is one of the first production three-phase AC locomotives equipped with regenerative braking. It w...

I went hiking in England in the past week. Although most of my intercity travel was made by coach bus (for budgetary and logistical reasons), being who I am, I still had to slip a train ride in there somewhere, didn't I. By Geof Sheppard - Own work , CC BY-SA 3.0 , Link What could be a more suitable way to end my hike than a train ride on the quaint and picturesque single track Tarka Line from Barnstaple to Exeter? In the gentle green hills of Devon, DMUs on this line traverse a scenic 40 miles along the Rivers Creedy, Yeo, and Taw. The Tarka Line got its name from Tarka the Otter , a local animal hero from a novel by the same name. It is part of what used to be the North Devon Railway between Bideford and Exeter. Today, the line terminates in Barnstaple . Barnstaple Station today consists of a sole platform and track. By Geni at the English language Wikipedia , CC BY-SA 3.0 , Link Barnstaple as a Junction Station in yesteryear. By Ben Brooksbank, CC BY-SA 2.0 , Li...

I got to meet my childhood hero, and it's everything I dreamed it would be! Yes, by it, I mean a train, of course, given how weird and awkward I am as a human being, this shouldn't come as a surprise. It all happened when I still lived in Asia, more than half a lifetime ago. The Chinese Railways, whatever they called themselves back in the 1990s, bought (or "leased") a set of the X2 (a.k.a. X2000 or SJ 2000) from SJ for services on the KCR (Kowloon to Canton Railway) at 125 mph (the first ever regular service in China at that speed). Granted, being Chinese, they'd also conveniently and inadvertently copied its design, albeit not quite so successfully (see DJJ1 ). 由 慕尼黑啤酒 - 自己的作品 ， CC BY-SA 3.0 ， 链接  (the Chinese X2) This time around, the X2 also brought me about my first impressions of the friendly Swedes. Judging from the sign of me taking pictures like a mad (or normal) Chinese tourist, not one, but two drivers invited me on a tour of the cab. Finally,...

Three months ago, Amtrak released this video after signing a new deal to purchase the next-generation Acela Express from our old friend Alstom. It is called the Avelia Liberty. At the minute mark, it states that this train shares a common platform that has been proven in service. Hold on a minute, what common platform? Revenue service? What's an Avelia? Yes, that was a long-winded way of getting into today's topic, and let me do the Googling, so you don't have to (if you have not already, that is). According to Alstom's product web page, all of their current high-speed trains are now branded Avelia. This includes the Pendolino, the TGV Euroduplex, the AGV, and of course, our Avelia Liberty. What I find interesting, is the fact that this family name has yet to be mentioned much or marketed heavily at all. In fact, I don't think it is that good of an idea. Alstom's high-speed trains ranges are already very well known worldwide, so why cause confusion? This...

Although it is still premature to pop the champagne on the Brightline High Speed Rail between Orlando and Miami, this week marks a milestone in the history of this much-anticipated rail service. The first fully assembled trainset (two Siemens Charger locomotives plus four intermediate cars) has arrived in South Florida, after a special transcontinental delivery from its birthplace of Sacramento, California. With the year 2017 looming around the corner, we can almost hear the "all aboard" call from Brightline's Phase One opening between Miami and West Palm Beach (Click here for more from the Railway Gazette). The second phase of the service, covering the rest of its length to Orlando, however, wanders in limbo. Once promised the funding of this rail service, the Government had pulled the rug from underneath. In the meantime, please enjoy these early footages of what I shall call the "Brightliner," and feel free to explore more about this project o...

4 AM. Excited and foggy at the same time, I crawled out of bed. The instant coffee from the hotel would do. Dressed in clothes warmer than I usually would, in anticipation of beautiful snowy mountains, I marched towards the S-Bahn station in the empty streets of Vienna. A slight hesitation saw to it that the suburban train left me behind. But what was to come, was better than I could have hoped for. A shiny Siemens Desiro came to a stop. As I stepped inside, I was greeted by that new train smell, still lingering in the air. The clock had just ticked past the quarter hour mark past five, but Wien Hauptbahnhof was already a bustling place. Following the signage, I ascended onto the mainline platforms, where my Zürich bound Railjet stood. This was my first time onboard one. The interior was simple but functional, indeed, a very clean and modern design. At 5:30 sharp, the train effortlessly pulled out of the station. Unlike most people, who traveled one station far, I was on thi...

Last week, I disappeared for a little while. But rest assured. I have brought great experiences to share. Succumbing to the craving for some mountains and snow, I decided to head south (yes, south), to where the majestic mountains met the white fluffy. Into the Alps, I went. Conveniently, I had also in my possession, an Austria-Germany rail pass with 3 days still unused, 2 weeks from its expiry. It took two trains (both InterCity Express), and the better part of a day to get to Vienna, where I chose to host my overnight stays, from the NRW. Despite all that I’d heard about German efficiency and precision, 33 minutes proved to be not quite enough of a layover to change trains. As I watched the ICE 3 that brought me to Würzburg depart towards its final intermediate stop of Nuremberg before reaching Munich, 40 minutes behind schedule, an extra 2 hours had befallen into my hands. No love lost at this point, Würzburg had been on my bucket list for a day trip, I just needed to make ...

Remember the Flying Hamburger (or well, a better translation, Hamburg Flyer) I wrote about on this blog a while ago? The good ol' SVT 137 high speed articulated diesel multiple units from the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft  (German Imperial Railway) era? The trainset had also been used for an international service called the, Berolina, introduced in 1959 between Berlin and Warsaw. They weren't replaced by locomotive-hauled trains until the 1970s. Given the trainset was designed in the 1930s, that was quite the life it had. Anyway, I found some more old footages of the trainset on YouTube. The second video on this page is a documentary on how the SVT 137 was made in the factory. It's in German but it's quite entertaining to watch.

In the late 1960s, the Canadian National Railway bought some new passenger cars for intercity services between Toronto and Windsor/Sarnia. These cars were called Tempo cars. Unlike most other passenger cars in North America (especially from the time) that were inadvertently somehow a Budd or Pullman of some sort, the Tempo cars had aluminium body shells and were built by the Canadian division of British builder Hawker Siddeley in Thunder Bay, ON. " Ski Train Tempo cars (2851886846) " by vxla from Chicago, US - HPIM7117 . Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons . " D&RGW Ski Train 01 " by NateBeal - Ski Train . Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons . " CN Tempo service to Windsor " by Robert Taylor from Stirling, Canada - CN Tempo service to Windsor Uploaded by Skeezix1000 . Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons . The Tempo cars were one of the earlier examples of passenger cars with inboard bearings with outboa...

We are going Polish this week again, since we have so little exposure on that part of the world regarding their railroad equipment (I mean honestly, until I started looking for things to fill this blog with, I didn't even know they made locomotives and trainsets). So the feature this week comes from the same manufacture that has been gaining some more attention in recent time. This locomotive has also been on display at the InnoTrans in Berlin, it's called the Gama from Polish builder Pesa. According to the Polish Wikipedia page of this locomotive (thank goodness for Google Translate), the Gama has quite a few variants, which makes me think that this locomotive is still work in progress. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see different manufactures coming up with their own designs. In the most part, the Gama is a pretty standard product you'd get from builders today. I'll leave it up to you to have a look at the locomotive's official site on their market...

So at this very moment that I'm getting ready to update my blog for this coming week, I am fascinated by this Wikipedia page on the list of InterCity Express services offered by the Deustche Bahn. I know this probably makes me a total weirdo and nerd, but I just think the numbered lines are so neat. " ICE-International 1826 Bahnsteiganzeige " by Lüko Willms - eigene Aufnahme (german for: I took the picture myself). Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons . " Db-401064-01 " by K. Jähne - Own work . Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 de via Wikimedia Commons . It amazes me how many places one can go from Frankfurt by train (if you take a moment to look at the actual routes, wow), and in the very near future, there is supposed to be a direct service from Frankfurt to London St Pancras International. " Db-403xxx-09 " by K. Jähne - Own work . Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons . Yes, many of the romantic and nostalgic long...

This week's post will just be a little show and tell, based on something I saw on the news. It's about a new double deck express train the SBB-CFF-FFS has now certified to operate in Switzerland. It is built by Bombardier, and following the company's trend on ending product names with "XX", this EMU is called the TWINDEXX. I won't be writing too much. Instead I will link you to the trainset's web page on Bombardier's website. There aren't videos on YouTube of this train operating in service yet, so a video of this EMU in transit will have to do for now.

The train of this week is a modern electric passenger locomotive from Russia. It's called EP20 and it's the product of a collective effort between Alstom and CJSC Transmashholding , the largest Russian locomotive builder. You may remember this locomotive from recent news, because it's featured in some of the photographs in the articles on the commencing of Talgo sets on the Russian Railways (RZD). " 2 EP20 na Rostov Glavny " by Gwinogradow - Own work . Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons . Unlike the other European passenger locomotives, the EP20 has six axles, and uses somewhat of an unusual axle arrangement. Instead of using two 3-axle trucks, the EP20 has three 2-axle trucks (i.e. B-B-B). Locomotives like this do exist; they are just rarely seen outside of, say, Japan. " Фирменный поезд "Буревестник" " by Айнар - http://www.train-photo.ru/details.php?image_id=142288&mode=search . Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via W...

Okay I'm not gonna drop the ball again this week, so I'll start early (FYI it's 30 May right now). Diesel-electric locomotives (or really, diesel locomotives in general) are somewhat of a rare breed in countries like Japan where railroads mass-electrified right after the steam era. Japan does keep a fleet of diesel locomotives/MUs for areas that are less densely populated, but the vast majority of them are of the diesel-hydraulic type. " JNR DF50 65 DF50 1 hikyou go kawaguchi " by Spaceaero2 - Own work . Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons . So let me get right to the chase then. The Class DF50, unlike most Japanese diesels, is indeed a diesel-electric. 138 of this class of locomotives were jointly built by a number of builders (many of which still exist today) starting between 1957 and 1963. They were operated by the JNR up until 1983. The locomotives were built in two batches, the first of which by Kisha, Nippon Sharyo, and Mitsubishi ...

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 ...

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.