{"id":3886,"date":"2011-05-15T19:00:53","date_gmt":"2011-05-15T19:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/?p=3886"},"modified":"2012-09-10T13:37:55","modified_gmt":"2012-09-10T12:37:55","slug":"articulated-steam-locomotives-planned-for-kandahar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/articulated-steam-locomotives-planned-for-kandahar\/","title":{"rendered":"Articulated steam locomotives planned for Kandahar"},"content":{"rendered":"

With Azerbaijan being in the news this weekend<\/a>, it might be a good time1<\/a><\/sup> to mention the book The Transcaucasian Railway and the Royal Engineers<\/cite> by RAS Hennessey (Trackside Publications<\/a>, 2004. There is a review of it at The International Steam Pages<\/a>). <\/p>\n

On page 26 the book mentions the use of class \u0472 (an obsolete Russian letter, fita), Bryansk-built 0-6-6-0 Mallet articulated compound steam locomotives on the Transcaucasian Railway.<\/p>\n

“An interesting speculation about these Mallets is that their basic design had in mind imperial Russian dreams of a line from Merv to Kandahar<\/a>, Afghanistan, and thence to Quetta, then in British India (now in Pakistan). The tough conditions of the TCR’s Armenian lines provided a good testing ground for possible locomotives to work this line.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The reference says this information comes from J Nurminen and FM Page’s book Russian Locomotives vol 2 1836-1904<\/cite> (I think this should read 1905-24<\/em>, as 1836-1904 is volume 1, by A De Pater and FM Page). I haven’t yet found a library with a copy of the book to look up the reference.<\/p>\n

According to Hennessey, the TCR locomotives “were costly to acquire and their complexity resulted in slow, expensive servicing and maintenance […] Two were apparently spotted derelict in the 1930s at Kars, by then in Turkey.”<\/p>\n

There are no photographs of a fita class locomotive in the book. However this photo I spotted on display at the St Petersburg railway museum<\/a> in March 2011 shows one:
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

The Russian-language Wikipedia has some basic information on the \u0472 class<\/a>, though with no mention of Afghanistan. There is also a public domain image from the Kirov plant’s archive showing one with detail differences to the machine in the St Petersburg museum photo:
\n<\/p>\n

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  1. Tenuous link to popular culture or what? And anyway, I thought the Moldovan gnomes<\/a> should’ve won. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    With Azerbaijan being in the news this weekend, it might be a good time1 to mention the book The Transcaucasian Railway and the Royal Engineers by RAS Hennessey (Trackside Publications, 2004. There is a review of it at The International Steam Pages). On page 26 the book mentions the use of class \u0472 (an obsolete […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[111,153,163,186],"class_list":["post-3886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistans-railways","category-history","tag-mallet","tag-russia","tag-steam-loco","tag-transcaucasian-railway"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3886"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5198,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3886\/revisions\/5198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andrewgrantham.co.uk\/afghanistan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}