Notes

I’ve spent another afternoon at the Siemens Testcenter Wildenberg-Wegrath and found a place where you can actually get directly to the track, without any fence, very easily.

Here, we see two MaK locomotives, a G 1000 BB (gray) and a G 1206 BB (red), color-coded for your convenience. Neither seems to have received an operating number yet, which actually makes sense given that they are here on test runs. Both types are classic road switchers, with a top speed of 100 kph (60 mph) and a power output of 1500 kW (2011 hp) on the G 1206 and 1100 kW (1475 hp) on the G 1000.

The G 1206 does not have any markings, but the gray G 1000 is marked for Euro Cargo Rail (ECR), a french freight rail operator, which is owned by british English, Welsh and Scottish Railway (EWS) (the locomotive even has a small EWS logo on the side), which in turn is owned by german DB Schenker. Why this is not all just called DB Schenker, I guess we’ll never know.

A number of G 1206 owned by ECR are maintained in the EWS depots in Britain, which means they have to get hauled through the Channel Tunnel every time they are up for maintenance. They are allocated TOPS class 21 for this purpose (although, strangely enough, they don’t have yellow ends). I wonder whether the same will happen to this G 1000 here.