Tuesday 12 February 2008

Railway miscellany

A quiet blogging day means I can upload a few railway pics (for the anoraks among my readers really). All taken last Saturday. Above: A Czech Railways 181-class engine hauls a coal train to Okęcie. Quite what an engine from the Czech Republic is doing up Jeziorki way? I do know that moving coal around Poland has ceased to be the monopoly of Polish state railways (PKP) and that a number of private operators such as PCC Rail are doing this work. I read on this site that the above engine (181 131-4) has been leased from CD (Ceske Drahy) to PCC Tabor Szczakowa to move coal trains from the Silesian coalfields to the sidings at Okęcie from which PCC's own diesel locos move the wagons to the Warsaw's Siekierki power station. Above: A diesel double-header takes a full coal train to Siekierki, having just passed W-wa Dawidy station. The lead loco is PKP SM-48 087 (version of Russian-built TEM-2 for Poland), following it is a PCC Rail ST-44 1099. The latter, nicknamed 'Gagar' by Polish train spotters, has all but disappeared from Polish rails, and is seen today mostly on industrial lines such as this. Gagars have a high axle weight (a few years ago the wooden sleepers on the Okęcie-Siekierki coal line were all replaced with concrete ones), and are very thirsty of the diesel oil and chuck out clouds of dirty fumes, as is visible in the photo. Above: A Radom-bound suburban train on its way between W-wa Dawidy and W-wa Jeziorki. This photo to me is the very quintessence of the Jeziorki's railway landscape; the flat fields, farmland, snowdrift fences, the bleakly-fecund familiar; the electric wires and gantries, sun burning through the morning fog. Note the kilometre marker on the left - we are 2.5km from Okęcie sidings.

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