Notes

Yesterday I was out again, to take pictures of trains in Hamburg. A train you meet a lot there is the Metronom. The metronom Eisenbahngesellschaft is owned, through various intermediates, by the federal states of Lower Saxony, Bremen and Hamburg as well as british Arriva, and operates mainly express trains on various lines there. Interestingly, all rolling stock is owned by and rented from the Landesnahverkehrsgesellschaft Niedersachsen (State public transit authority Lower Saxony) and hence by the federal state, a model that was invented to allow smaller companies to enter the market without having to invest as much into the rolling stock.

The fleet is rather uniform. The 34 locomotives are all either Bombardier Traxx P160 AC2, Traxx 2 P160 AC2 or Traxx 2E P160 DE (the last one is diesel), and the carriages are all modern standard Bombardier double-decker cars. Here, one such train has just reached it’s final destination, the central station of Hamburg.