Tag Archives: rail freight

Trams and freight trains share the road in Bremen

I’ve written about freight trams before, but in the city of Bremen in northeast Germany freight there is something a little different – a freight siding that shares the tram tracks. Photo by Spoorjan, via Wikimedia Commons The freight siding […]

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ОПЭ1 electro-diesel locomotives of the former USSR

An electro-diesel locomotive is a unit that can operate from either an external electric power source, or standalone with an onboard diesel engine, and on the railways of the former USSR is an interesting example – the ОПЭ1 and subsequent […]

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Freight trams of Europe

Trams are usually used to carry passengers, but across Europe there are a handful of tramway networks that also carry freight. Pure freight The best known in the English speaking world is the ‘CarGoTram‘ of Dresden, Germany. Photo by kaffeeeinstein, […]

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Transporting spent nuclear fuel on the Russian Railways

With a large fleet of nuclear power stations used for electricity generation across Russia, there is also an increasing quantity of отработанного ядерного топлива (spent nuclear fuel) needing to be safely transported to reprocessing or storage facilities, where the useful […]

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Germany’s one woman freight railway

Across Germany there are many small rail freight operators, but there are none smaller than ‘Rail 4U’ – a one-woman operation founded by Barbara Pirch in 2001.


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Moving a nuclear reactor by rail

Plenty of freight is moved by rail, but something you don’t expect to see being moved by train is a nuclear reactor. But in 2016 it did – when the 330 tonne, 13-metre high and 4.5 meters diameter nuclear reactor vessel was transported from the Atommash plant in Volgodonsk, Russia to the under construction Belarusian nuclear power plant.


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