First Evolution Series locomotive arriving soon in China

[MEC407]

From MarketWatch:

BEIJING & ERIE, Pa., Aug 21, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- GE Transportation, a unit of General Electric Company, announced that the first China Mainline Locomotive (CML) will be delivered around Aug. 30, 2008, to the Tianjin Port in Tianjin, China. After being transferred to the Tanggu Depot for inspection, the locomotive will make its way to China's capital Beijing.

Locomotive "CML 50001" is the first of three hundred 6,000-horsepower Evolution(R) Series China Mainline Locomotives being delivered to the Ministry of Railways P.R. China (MOR). The contract was signed in October 2005 and valued at $450 million.

GE Transportation is headquartered in Erie, Pennsylvania (USA), and will supply the 300 locomotives in an industrial cooperation with Qishuyan Locomotive and Rolling Stock Works (QSY) based in Changzhou, China.

Read the rest of the article at:

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/f ... &dist=hppr

And for a photo, check out:

http://www.railwaygazette.com/news_view ... china.html

[Allen Hazen]

The bit in the "marketwatch" article about how the new locomotive's lesser weight will increase its environmental friendliness...
I suppose undedr some circumstances it might (hmmm... requires less fuel when running light?), but basically that's a non-technical journalist trying to make a necessity (China's railroads have lower permissible axle loadings than the US's) sound like a virtue!
Thanks for posing the links!
---
It shouldn't be a surprise that it is POSSIBLE to design a locomotive with a GEVO-16 that is a lot lighter than an American ES-44. The 16 cylinder GEVO engine is about the same size, and I think likely about the same weight, as the old "English Electric" engine used in British Rail's Class 56 locomotives in the 1970s: that was a CC design weighing in the neighborhood of 280,000 pounds.

[Allen Hazen]

For the record, since I mentioned weight, Sean Graham-White has posted to the Yahoo "World Diesel Locomotives" group that both the new GE locomotive and the competing EMD 6000hp unit for China weigh about 330,000 pounds: 30 to 50 tons less than a domestic 4400hp unit.

[diburning]

Jsut in case anyone is wondering, they are designated ES59ACi