Hurried Swiss

Unintended panning shot of a Swiss electric hauling a freight train through Leverkusen Alkenrath, seen here above the Autobahn A1.

It's an Re 4/4 II, a universal locomotive class that was built from 1964 to 1986. In 2002, the Swiss Federal Railways founded the subcompany SBB Cargo, which was to operate in Germany as well. For this purpose, a batch of 27 locomotives were converted for use on the German rail network. Thanks to the catenary voltages being identical in both countries, this only meant minor changes like a smaller snowplough, added German train protection systems and a wider contact shoe for one of the two pantographs. Since 2004, you can spot such locomotives all over Germany, with this being the first time that I managed to catch one. If you look closely, you can even see that it still uses spoked, rather than solid wheels.

The weather today was quite amazing, considering that it's almost October. Rode my bike around for a bit, hoping to make use of the sunlight, but without a 103 to shoot, it was all full of boring locomotives. Except for this one of course. Sadly, my shutter was a bit too slow for the panning action, making for an unintended blurred background. Oh well, at least the locomotive came out okay.