Uzbek Copper country
After a quite uneventful winter I have spent the last two months travelling to some quite far-flung place courtesy of work. I spent the last two weeks in Uzbekistan on a project but was able to take atleast some time for railfanning. The mainlines in Uzbekistan are nowdays dominated by modern Chinese locomotives, but a fair bit of Soviet era stuff survives on secondary duties and on industrial railways. Probably the most interesting industrial line is the Almalyk mine copper railway. This line basically serves as a conveyor belt between the mine and smelter, and trains run nearly every 15 minutes, with some dead spells here and there. The mainline is triple track with two lines for the slow loaded trains and one for the emptys. Almost all trains are hauled by the class ПЭ2У (PE2U) locomotives. These are really quite crazy machines with two powered dump wagons behind the main traction unit. In practice the two powered wagons are not unloaded as I guess the rocks are needed for traction. Here a train is seen shortly after departing the mine in Almalyk. Interestingly, this locomotive was only built in 2011, but to the same Soviet design at the factory in Dnipro, Ukraine.
Uzbek Copper country
After a quite uneventful winter I have spent the last two months travelling to some quite far-flung place courtesy of work. I spent the last two weeks in Uzbekistan on a project but was able to take atleast some time for railfanning. The mainlines in Uzbekistan are nowdays dominated by modern Chinese locomotives, but a fair bit of Soviet era stuff survives on secondary duties and on industrial railways. Probably the most interesting industrial line is the Almalyk mine copper railway. This line basically serves as a conveyor belt between the mine and smelter, and trains run nearly every 15 minutes, with some dead spells here and there. The mainline is triple track with two lines for the slow loaded trains and one for the emptys. Almost all trains are hauled by the class ПЭ2У (PE2U) locomotives. These are really quite crazy machines with two powered dump wagons behind the main traction unit. In practice the two powered wagons are not unloaded as I guess the rocks are needed for traction. Here a train is seen shortly after departing the mine in Almalyk. Interestingly, this locomotive was only built in 2011, but to the same Soviet design at the factory in Dnipro, Ukraine.