Train of the Week

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 slacked off last week again, didn’t I. Anyhow, let’s continue with the Paella theme and check out the AVE Class 100. As you may recall, AVE stands for Alta Velocidad Española, the service name used by the Spanish national passenger operator, Renfe, on its high-speed trains. A Class 100 on the Madrid to Barcelona high-speed line The story here sounds similar to some of the other countries that got into the high-speed rail business by importing in the later parts of the 20th century. The Class 100, like the first KTX (Korea Train eXpress), are derived from the iconic TGV Atlantique. Like the KTX, the styling of the AVE Class 100 has been modified slightly, resulting in a more rounded nose. Nonetheless, it does not require any effort to spot the family resemblance. By SeeSchloss - Own work , CC BY-SA 2.5 , Link The trains went into service in 1992, after the first standard gauge high-speed line was completed in Spain from Madrid to Seville (it was almost going to be Iberian ...

A very well made video by YouTube user Mikhail@Novgorod showing various types equipment on the Córdoba to Málaga High-Speed Line I have already written about some of the  Siemens Velaro family of high-speed trains in earlier posts, but I wanted to dedicate this one to the Velaro E (for España), or more commonly known as the AVE (Alta Velocidad Española or Spanish High Speed) Class 103 . A Class 103 towards Barcelona on the outskirts of Madrid On the outside, the Velaro E looks almost identical to the ICE 3 , which is a product jointly developed by a number of companies in Germany. However, due to licensing issues, Siemens re-developed components on the ICE 3 it did not make, thus completing the Velaro platform of high-speed trains. The Velaro E also received an upgrade in the traction department, in order to cope with the demand for higher acceleration and maximum speed by Renfe (the Spanish national railway company). As a result, the AVE Class 103 is authorized for ser...

The night I was on the Arctic Circle Train, it felt more like an Asian tour bus than anything. I had no idea there would be so many Asian tourists in Stockholm and heading north all at the same time. Anyway. I boarded the train before it was overrun The train itself, a locomotive hauled night train with aging long-distance cars, feels more familiar than the typical futuristic European multiple units. There are the relatively large seats (no leg rests, unfortunately) and the 100 mph top speed, which we are more accustomed to on our side of the Atlantic. I would go as far as calling the Arctic Circle Train the Canadian (of course, minus the Skyline and observation cars) from another dimension. It comes from a world that looks and feels similar but sounds completely different. Oh, did I mention that almost the entire network in Sweden is also electrified? An intermediate stop somewhere, early morning on Boxing Day Ready to depart Kiruna towards Narvik in Norway

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 ...

I didn't have much time to write much this week as I just completed an almost-transcontinental move from Alberta back to my homeland of Ontario (over a distance of over 2 000 miles). I spent 3 days driving and 2 nights staying at campsites along the way. On the second night, I camped at the beautiful Neys Provincial Park on Lake Superior, somewhere along Highway 17 between Schreiber and White River (it's about a good 12 hour drive from the Toronto Area). The northern border of this park is defined by the right-of-way of the Canadian Pacific transcontinental mainline (well, yes, there's the possibility that you'll be woken up by a really long freight train snaking their way through). Anyway, the footage below was shot by a fellow camper at the park 2 years ago. Hope you enjoy it.

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...

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.

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 ...

Yeah... I got carried away by other stuff this week and forgot to update this blog on time. Anyway, I guess I'll do the easy thing and make it a show and tell again. Below is a very high level film made by the NHK about the Japanese high speed trains linked from YouTube. The narrator sounds like a Brit so it must be legit.

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 ...

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...

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 ...

News! Well, right now as I'm writing this on the 8th anyway... See I kind of shot myself in the foot when I named this blog Train of the Week... So the first 12-car ICx has taken to the rails! I had to specify the number of cars because there's also a 7-car, slightly less fast (because it's not slow either), version coming later. I'd think ICx wouldn't be the final name for this EMU though. I mean what's next then? ICy? Anyway, at least for now, to distinguish the two variants, the 7-car version is classed as the K1n, and the 12-car version the K3s. Clearly I didn't pay enough attention to InnoTrans back in 2012, or I forgot, the ICx was first unveiled there. She's intended to replace the current push-pull IC, ICE1, and ICE2 trains in corridors where it's not practical to operate new ICE trains. At the beginning, K3s was supposed to be 10-car sets, this was changed by DB in 2013. Thank Wikimedia Commons for the picture below. A mock-up, kind ...

So I'd like to share a video today of what's up and coming in the next decade in the world of high speed ground travel. The video is the Series L0 Shinkansen pre-production set undergoing endurance testing on Yamanashi Test Line. She will be operating on the, now under construction, Chūō Shinkansen Line . Please feel free to follow the hyperlinks to find out more about this Shinkansen in the near future.

This is probably the 3rd post about the Zefiro 380 by Bombardier. I had previously jump the gun because I was so excited about this Very High Speed EMU. Finally, there have been some actual production trainsets running around in revenue testing service these days. German Engineering. What a beauty The Zefiro 380 is built by Bombardier Sifang Power Transportation in Qingdao, China, a former German colony locally known for its beer (definitely a very suitable place for a German transportation giant), for the sole operator so far of this EMU, China Railway High-speed. The Chinese classification for this beautifully designed trainset is CRH380D. The number 380 bears some significance here. Indeed these CRH380s are the world's first trainsets that are designed for a sustained top speed of 380 km/h or 236 mph in revenue service. Unfortunately the operator has opted for a really plain interior Alternate cars in the Zefiro 380 are powered and they come in either 8- or 6-car con...