Back in the mid 90’s, i read about a handful of Russian built switchers imported to Houston Texas. Years later i heard they were still there, held hostage by trade restrictions. Does anyone know of their where-abouts since? Thanks
Ed might know the answer since that’s his area but I believe that the locomotives never actually cleared Customs and wound up being returned to Russia.
I do remember seeing a picture of them languishing in a semi-derelict state on a siding in the port. I don’t recall what publication that was in (Extra 2200 South?). Apparently they were purchased dirt cheap but then the importer discovered that bringing them up to US specs was cost prohibitive…
The locomotives you are thinking about are TEM7s…junk on wheels.
I have climbed inside them, you wouldn’t want to spend ten minutes running these things, much less a full shift.
The engineers seat is a un-padded bar stool, all of the switches inside the cab look like household light switches, the heater for the cab is a single vent in the floor, no A/C…and the trucks look like something the creators of the Transformers though up, I doubt they could get them out of the Port by rail with out derailing…they got to where they are right now by ship, then about a mile of straight track.
They may still sit inside the Greensport complex, but have been moved several times…last time I saw them, they looked even worst than when the linked page described them.
The reason they were impounded was because of the import irregularities mentioned in the article, but once that was resolved, it turns out making these thing FRA compliant would be quite an expensive project.
Simple safety issues alone would take a while to resolve…and the brakes are not designed for real MU capability, if you run two of them together, you have to have a man in each cab to work the brakes on the locomotives, and one of them has to work the train line separately.
http://www.trainweb.org/southwestshorts/russian.html
Check this link for photos and a brief description.
Erie still want the Russian decapods? to re-gauge them?
RIX
It says they’re for sale. I wonder what their scrap value would be if it’d be too expensive to ‘American-ize’ them.
The last I read about them (I think in Trains mag) was that nobody wanted to buy them and they got sold to a scrapper in the last few years.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that there were also issues about lead paint, or perhaps asbestos?