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4rail.net - Reference - Sweden | |
 Welcome to the near future home of Swedish Main Page. We will start by building a picture gallery on the Swedish rolling stock and go into details later. Sweden is a highly interesting rairoading country. While the country for long was socialdemocratic (i.e. against the free enterprise), the freight railroads took the other way and by now the environment is far from monolithic single railroad operator model. Sweden has gone far in opening it's rail networks to both private and public operators. As a result there are now dozens of operators for freight and local traffic and much of the rolling stock is of the same large selection found anywhere within the EU countries. One part missing from the competiton is teh long distance passenger rail service, which is currently operated only by state railways SJ with no competition allowed. In general this heterogenous competition environment is in strong contrast with neighboring country Finland, where no start for even a second railway operator seems to happen. Both countries belong to the European Union, so the rules of competition and environment are pretty much the same, Finland being more private enterprise minded. Pictures for the High Speed in Sweden While Sweden currently lacks the super high speed trains, the country has seen days of national pride on the tilting unit trains and RC-locomotives some of which were sold to Amtrak in the U.S.A.!  I remember sitting on the station south of Stockholm watching some X2000's zoom by the station platform obviously just about full speed! Makes you wonder about the safety with all the passengers on the station. Other X2000's were stopping and I remember on one occasion seeing the engineer smoking a cigarette in the cabin with windows open, the rules for no smoking existed, but with no sanctions with the Swedish SJ (State railways) these were obviously of little effect. (Never seen anyone else smoking inside the drivers cabin in the Western Europe before or after.)  Pictures for the Locomotives in Sweden Swedish locomotive industry created some very famous electric traction power. Out of these, the RC6 was most successfull, with numerous units built or converted to this class. This type actually was even imported to the U.S. in the 1980's, still powering many of the Amtrak trains. Electric power lives long compared to the average diesels.  Here is an example of the RC6 locomotive under the Stockholms Central - the city center railway station. The train switching personnel has just finished coupling the locomotive with traditional long distance coaches. The locomotive has 4 axles and can be found in numerous color variants from themes years earlier! We will have pictures of the others on this page later.  234...
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Sources: General sources, Todays Railways Europe, ... |
Best Viewed with Mozilla Firefox! Click the pictures to see the larger version! Pictures from Aspen Sweden  The X2000 train is tilting towards the curve leading to Aspen in the Middle of Sweden, slightly north of Stockholm. Pictures by Lorenz Schmuckli 2008.  X2000 in the current livery approaching the Aspen station.  X2000 zooms by Aspen station. More pictures to follow later... |
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