Glorious Summer

Winter was very harsh this year, and now summer seems to arrive early. Shot this about three weeks ago when I just had to get away from the desk for a bit. You probably know the feeling when the sky is cloudless all day long, one just has to go out for a little bit to take advantage of it.

This was a rather unexpected sight, two MaK DE 1002 diesel-electric road switchers roaring through Leverkusen with some tank cars. Built in 1987 and now owned by the "Häfen und Güterverkehr Köln" (harbour and freight transport Cologne) or HKG for short.

What more to say about the locomotive... It's slow, has little power and appears to have been made out of Lego, looking at all those right angles. But it's a nice change to see a diesel in electric-land, on a high speed LZB equipped mainline, and despite having only about 1800hp each, they roared like the big ones! I also quite liked the colour, lighting, and composition, with that dude on the right side, station roof adding some contrast, and the arc visible in the train, due to an underpass. Not to mention some scrumptious heat distortion.