Train of the Week

This is the last Friday of the year. Thought I'd take it easy and post some amateur photos of trains. Usually I'd like to be on a train from a northern city (since there is no passenger rail service where I live currently) back to my hometown around this time of the year, but I couldn't. That's okay. These pictures were taken on a gloomy November day at one of my favorite spots in the BC Interior. I tried panning and a different number of things. Hopefully one day I'll be able to produce better photographs when I find the time and place to do so. Here you go.

This is probably a trainset I will have to write about a little more later on (or not). She's the newest member of the Japanese high speed train family. Mechanically, this new trainset is based on the current mountainous Nagano Shinkansen flagship, the Series E2. Not built for top speed, the Series E7 or W7 electric multiple unit (EMU), depends on whether owned by the East or West Japan Railway Company, is designed to replaced the E2 for the newest extension of the Japanese high speed rail network of the current Nagano Shinkansen, called the Hokuriku Shinkansen for the Hokuriku region. Upon the completion of the Hokuriku Shinkansen, the railroad companies of Japan will have almost completed a ring route in the center of the Honshu Island. It is also interesting that this is the first time the West Japan Railway Company (JR West) uses a classification scheme beginning with the letter W rather than a 3-digit number beginning with an odd number (i.e. traditionally, the Series ...

This week I want to write about one of the first locomotives that has carried the InterCity branding on the British Railways. Most of us not from the UK have probably have heard of the InterCity 125 and InterCity 225 at some point in time. However, this brand of flagship intercity trains have been in existence before the introduction of the above mentioned famous British high-speed trains. The Class 87 was a purpose built machine to haul fast service on the electrified West Coast Main Line between London Euston and Scotland. She bares the InterCity branding and routinely brings trains up to a maximum line speed of 110 mph, quite some speed for a blunt looking thing. Power, all 5 000 horsepower of it, comes from 4 DC traction motors. A total of 36 locomotives have been built by Crewe Works of the British Rail Engineering Limited between 1973 and 1975. The Class 87 served British passengers well past privatisation of the British Railways with Virgin Trains. One unit has b...

Fast train talk again this week. The Talgo 250 (comes under 2 classes under Spanish national passenger train operator Renfe, S130 and S730), as the name suggests, is a push-pull tilting trainset capable of 250 km/h or 155 mph in service. The special thing about this high-speed trainset though, is that she has an integrated gage changing system that works on the move at slow speed. Although we never need such a system, this is big in countries that traditionally have a different track gage until they adopt the standard gage high-speed rail (56.5 inches or 1 435 mm for the record). Spain’s existing rail network uses what’s called the Iberian gage, 65-21/32 inches or 1 668 mm. Being a push-pull, the Talgo 250 has locomotives of course. They are 4-axle units with AC traction motors pumping out 3 200 hp on high-speed lines and 2 700 hp on existing lines (in this case, speed is reduced to a max of 135 mph in service). The locomotives are made in Germany by Bombardier. Some trainset h...

This week, I'd like to share a short documentary film i found on YouTube about the InterCity APT (there are some link on this Wikipedia page that are definitely very much worth a while to visit), a failed experimental high speed train that, however, did not fail to inspire in engineering design of newer generation passenger rail equipment. The trainset is also known as the APT-P (because she isn't the only experimental APT, see my old post ), or classified as the Class 370 by British Railways. At the time, the InterCity APT was intended to be used on the electrified West Coast Main Line between London Euston and Glasgow Central. By now you must wonder what APT stands for-Advanced Passenger Train. In short, the InterCity APT is an articulated push-pull electric tilting trainset developed by the British Rail Engineering Limited. Non-powered cars on the train share trucks between them, and the cars tilt to a certain degree when the train goes around a curve. The exact amount ...

I’d like to leisurely write about a leisure summer heritage train ride in the historic county of Yorkshire in the Northeast of England. This train, named the Scarborough Spa Express, is currently operated by West Coast Railways , a privately owned charter train company. The Scarborough Spa Express at York The history of the Scarborough Spa Express began in 1981 as a twice weekly summer steam service offered by British Railways, 13 years after the withdrawal of mainline steam operation. The train was discontinued in 1988 by British Rail, operation had been changing hands a few times (including the National Railway Museum in the 2000s), until 2008, when it landed on her current operator. The train is hauled by various steam locomotives. Approaching Scarborough. This train ride begins in the beautiful City of York at her grand Victorian railway station (the Royal York Hotel and National Railway Museum are just steps away from the station) and goes in a loop via Wakefield an...

I think I’m gonna write about the other EMD GT46 this week (if you remember the Aussie GT46C from a few weeks ago). As always, a handsome EMD Before I go on, I guess I’m gonna revise here the usual naming convention (at least the part that I’m aware of) used by EMD. I may as well talk about, in a run on sentence, a brief history of where EMD comes from and has become. Began as the Electro Motive Corporation in the 1920s, soon EMC was purchased by General Motors and became the Electro Motive Division in America and General Motors Diesel Division in Ontario, it then was spun off as Electro Motive Diesel Inc. in 2005, and was finally purchased wholly by Caterpillar’s Progress Rail Services Corporation. For modern locomotives model numbers, initials GP means 4 axle general purpose, SD means 6 axle special duty, GT means export. So, by that last statement in the last paragraph, obviously the GT46 is an export locomotive. She’s a 6-axle locomotive equipped with 16 cylinder 710 ...