MAV 424
A long time ago - I think 1977 - I had a trip to Hungary to visit a penfriend there. I had a really good time - the country was already in the process of becoming quite liberal and there was a kind of exciting haze of doing stuff that was technically illegal but who cared?
Railway photography fell into this category, and I got shouted at a few times for pointing my camera at trains. But who could resist those lovely MAV (Hungarian State Railways) locomotives.
At Vacs motive power depot I was happily running my camera and tape measure around one of these beautiful 424's when I found a policeman standing next to me. But he was obviously a railway fan himself and very proud of the engines. He muttered something about 'not photographing installations' and then let me get on taking pictures of the engines to my heart's content.
In those days all the Hungarian engines carried red stars on the front of the smokebox which made them look like something out of a John le Carre novel. Here's 424.287 in Budapest recently on the shuttle service out to the (excellent I'm told!) railway museum. I can't wait to make a trip ...
photo thanks to Michael Taylor
posted by Iain @ 4:22 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Hello Iain.
What wheel arrangement is this locomotive? Is this a dual service 2-10-0 type common in eastern europe perhaps?
I enjoy your blog site, and so do some of My railfan buddies here in Chicago. Nice photographs.
Thank You.
Eddie.
http://eddiesrailroad.blogspot.com
Interesting you should think that Eddie. In England we call such classes 'Mixed Traffic' and our design which is closest is our '9F' which actually is a 2-10-0
But this MAV design is a 4-8-0, a rather unusual arrangement even in Europe. The other well known 4-8-0 design is from the country next door - Austria - and was built by their engineer Golsdorf.
These MAV 424's ended up in lots of other parts of Eastern Europe, especially the former Yugoslavia and Roumania (at one time Transylvania, now in Roumania, was part of Hungary and their 'mountain division' in terms of locomotives).
Some of the most handsome locos I've ever seen are the CSV (Czech) express designs. I'll include something on them soon
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