Notizen

Circumstances that would take too long to explain[^1] found me in Düsseldorf yesterday, a city I normally avoid. Compared to Cologne, it has only hourly rail connections from Aachen (well, one of the trains that connect Aachen and Cologne continues to Düsseldorf, but I don’t have a free ticket for that part yet), takes longer getting to, has an extremely ugly central station and is, in my opinion, just not as interesting. But since I was there, I decided I could spend some time taking pictures there as well.

The class 422 EMU (sometimes also called ET 422) is the newest train on the S-Bahn Rhein-Ruhr commuter rail network, in operation for not even half a year. I already took a picture of one before, at the Innotrans rail exhibition, but now they are in normal service and have already replaced all of this network’s class 420 EMUs, which were never too common here to begin with. Recently announced plans state that all lines that aren’t yet operated with the 422’s predecessor, confusingly named class 423, are to be converted to the 422 in the next years. In particular, this means the end for trains with a class 143 locomotive and unpowered Type x carriages.

The 422 looks very different from (and much better than) the 423, but it’s only a slight evolution. It just received a completely new cab to comply with new crash safety specifications. Other than that, it has more braking power (which was quite a problem on the 423 and the derived regional EMUs) and altered doors, to recognize people in the door more reliably, but on the inside the two are completely identical.

It seems that unlike the 420 that it replaces here or even the 423, which is also seen in Munich, Frankfurt and Stuttgart, the 422 will not become the new standard commuter EMU. Nuremberg plans to use Bombardier Talent 2 (class 442), while the new franchise contract for Stuttgart’s commuter rail mentions a class 430, about which I don’t know anything at all, to replace the remaining 420s.

[^1]: I’ve been authorized to say that the rumors about dinosaur involvement are mostly untrue.