Stairway to heaven
Said starway isn't what I was standing on while taking the picture, it rather relates to the current state of the locomotive presented on the picture. The ET42-025 shown here running alone through Kraków Mydlniki in the direction of Zabierzów is no more in service (presumably hasn't been for a couple of months now), and the railway station has undergone a massive modernisation, leading to a classically standardised look without the footbridge or any romanticism ;), as you can see by yourself over here.
In general the whole ET42 class of engines is coming to an inevitable end, as more and more Dragon locomotives are delivered from Newag to PKP Cargo. At the time of writing this description (12.01.2024) there are only 17 locomotives in service, from what used to be a series of 50 engines produced between 1978-1982 in НЭВЗ (Новочеркасск, Russia). They were innitially mostly deployed on the railway line connecting Silesia with the northern harbours in Gdynia and Gdańsk, but in recent years also spread to majority of the country, even becoming relatively common in Warsaw since around 2018, which was unthinkable beforehand.
From what I heard, the ET42 locomotives were generally a pretty successful series, thanks to being based on ВЛ10 engines, which had already been after years of service in the harshest conditions of the Soviet Union. Extremely reliable, easy to repair, but not without their downsides, the worst of which is that the locomotives could get extremely hot in summer, forcing drivers to provide different ways of cooling by themselves.
A little curiosity on all of the engines is their paint scheme, which differed from the standardised PKP livery. All ET42 locos had a big V-shape at the very front, presumably as a tribute to the ВЛ10 forefathers. The colour of the stripe making up the V differed across the years, together with the general paint schemes of PKP, but never really disappeared until the corporate scheme of PKP Cargo was introduced. Initially yellow on minty green background, then it turned to orange with the introduction of the 'yellow fronts' in 1989 and finally settled on red after the grassy-green livery was made the new standard. Despite generally liking the yellow fronts, I find that the red stripe on grassy green fits these Soviet monsters best.
The nicknames, which the railfans came up with included Czapajew and Rusek, generally very generic names which could theoretically be attributed to any locomotive of Soviet origin, just as Gagarin become a common way to call ST44.
Photo by Piotrek/Toprus
Stairway to heaven
Said starway isn't what I was standing on while taking the picture, it rather relates to the current state of the locomotive presented on the picture. The ET42-025 shown here running alone through Kraków Mydlniki in the direction of Zabierzów is no more in service (presumably hasn't been for a couple of months now), and the railway station has undergone a massive modernisation, leading to a classically standardised look without the footbridge or any romanticism ;), as you can see by yourself over here.
In general the whole ET42 class of engines is coming to an inevitable end, as more and more Dragon locomotives are delivered from Newag to PKP Cargo. At the time of writing this description (12.01.2024) there are only 17 locomotives in service, from what used to be a series of 50 engines produced between 1978-1982 in НЭВЗ (Новочеркасск, Russia). They were innitially mostly deployed on the railway line connecting Silesia with the northern harbours in Gdynia and Gdańsk, but in recent years also spread to majority of the country, even becoming relatively common in Warsaw since around 2018, which was unthinkable beforehand.
From what I heard, the ET42 locomotives were generally a pretty successful series, thanks to being based on ВЛ10 engines, which had already been after years of service in the harshest conditions of the Soviet Union. Extremely reliable, easy to repair, but not without their downsides, the worst of which is that the locomotives could get extremely hot in summer, forcing drivers to provide different ways of cooling by themselves.
A little curiosity on all of the engines is their paint scheme, which differed from the standardised PKP livery. All ET42 locos had a big V-shape at the very front, presumably as a tribute to the ВЛ10 forefathers. The colour of the stripe making up the V differed across the years, together with the general paint schemes of PKP, but never really disappeared until the corporate scheme of PKP Cargo was introduced. Initially yellow on minty green background, then it turned to orange with the introduction of the 'yellow fronts' in 1989 and finally settled on red after the grassy-green livery was made the new standard. Despite generally liking the yellow fronts, I find that the red stripe on grassy green fits these Soviet monsters best.
The nicknames, which the railfans came up with included Czapajew and Rusek, generally very generic names which could theoretically be attributed to any locomotive of Soviet origin, just as Gagarin become a common way to call ST44.
Photo by Piotrek/Toprus