Nice!

I think the town is also called Lajkovac,which is close to the town of Lazarevac,please see Wikipedia.

The electric loco's are interesting,they seem to be the well known Swedish type,used for passengers,freight,everything.
The coaches are obviously typical German.

Tractor is doing its job fine,but why 3 people required to move it???

Finally,people crossing the tracks by foot,is that really smart?

Cheers,
Paul.

Hi Paul,

Regarding the locos, the Swedish ones were class Rb and six of them were built with differing electrical equipment all being trial locos for what would come later, the class Rc. The locos wer both exported from Sweden and built in former Yugoslavia on license from ASEA. I took the liberty to link to two photos shown at www.jarnvag.net.





and as a comparison a class Rc1

Per,

The difference between the various sub types is not clear to me,but one thing is for sure,it is a bestseller from Sweden!
They were also sold to Austria,and do not forget Maerklin X995,the USA Amtrak version.

Paul.

Per,
If i do well recall,the first one appeared in the Maerklin portfolio in the early seventies.

More or less a similar story with the NS 1600/1700/1800 series,French made,suitable for 1,500 volts DC (DC!) on the Dutch network.
Maerklin kept on turning them out in all sorts of versions,each loco having its unique 'city weapon'.
Funny enough,as from the very first version,the cab was all metal,which is good.

Paul.

Hi Paul,

You are nearly right. Märklin came with their 3043 SJ Rc 1010 in 1968 (according to Helmut Kern) and I and my brother got ourselves one 3043 the same year. In my mind it was pretty amazing that Märklin were so fast in launching the 3043 since the prototype was delivered to SJ in 1967. Märklin also launched the 4072 and 4073 passenger coaches in 1968 and these coaches are models of SJ 1960-ies series coaches and therefore the most modern on Swedish rails at the time.

(I believe that Sweden was a much more important market then to Märklin compared to today. At that time Sweden was No 2 or 3 in standard of living in the world, the USA being No 1 and Switzerland competing with Sweden for No 2. This fact surely played a role at a time when WWII was only a bit over 20 years away and many countries still suffered from re-building and further developing their societies. Sweden was lucky that we never had to re-build our country).

To bring this back to the topic of shunters - the class Rc1 is today mostly used as shunters. (No need for tractors here! ).

Edited by user 13 May 2012 20:52:00(UTC)  | Reason: Typo

Paul,

Without knowing the real circumstances in that video all we can do is speculate, which will get us nowhere. Employment theory and practice is not my field of expertise, so let's not take that any further either.

I recall that slightly larger shunters, in the form of the ubiqutious NS 209-369 "Sik" (simular to the German Kof) were still used very frequently until 2003, and many were built before WW2. The only reason they were scrapped was because an accident on one of these resluted in their banning because they didn't have a dead-man's system.
As far as I know, the majority were never fitted with RC gear, meaning even in Holland shunting was still carried out in the traditional way less than a decade ago.

In any case, The tractor shown above is typical of the things built by a private industy and would typically only be used for one or two shunts a day, if that. Not really something that justifies RC gear. What may work very well in a big yard with lots of shunting to do may not be efficient at all when you are only doing an hour's shunting a day.... In fact last year I came past a very simular tractor converted for shunting on a daily basis, and although the wagons at that company changed from day to day, I never saw that tractor move.
For all we know this is actually the train crew that is doing the shunting, and once they have put the wagons where they should be they will put the little wee tractor back in it's shed and go off to the next station.

As for regional passenger train crews taking turns driving, all I have to say on that is this:
On the steam trains I help run every member of the crew has to verbally call the state of the signal(e.g. "green on top"), the section names on the token(without the appropriate token, a train is not allowed to enter a section) and a range of other things. Compare that to a single person in the cab, taking turns driving and collecting tickets, with his next/previous collecting turn in his mind, approaching a signal at danger in low visibility.
I know which one I perfer...

Cheers,
Rick