Shosholoza Meyl / PRASA Class 7E, E7010, is pictured here at the Transnet Engineering workshops in Durban, having just undergone a repaint into the Shosholoza Meyl purple livery. E7010 is an Eastern Cape locomotive and was ready and awaiting collection on our Railway Society visit early in June 2010. Col. André Kritzinger, in his fantastic research work on Wikipedia (List Of South African Locomotive Classes), includes the following information as part of his article on the Class 7E dual cab / bi-directional locomotive: "The 25 kV AC Class 7E electric locomotive was designed for the South African Railways (SAR) by the 50 c/s Group, consisting of ACEC of Belgium, AEG-Telefunken and Siemens of Germany, Alsthom-Atlantique and Société MTE of France, and Brown Boveri of Switzerland. They were built by Union Carriage and Wagon (UCW) in Nigel, Transvaal, who was the sub-contractor for mechanical components and assembly.
One hundred Class 7E locomotives were delivered in 1978 and 1979, numbered in the range from E7001 to E7100. Beginning with the Class 7E, the SAR numbering practice for electric locomotives was changed to make the class number a part of the locomotive’s number. From the Class 1E through to the last of the Class 6E1 series of locomotives, all electric locomotives were numbered sequentially in the number range from E1 to E2185, with twelve numbers in the range skipped.
UCW did not allocate builder’s numbers to the locomotives it built for the SAR, but used the SAR unit numbers for their record keeping."
Not
just heritage schemes, not just commemorative schemes - this album is devoted to some of the world's most interesting paint schemes, past or present.
