Torn Apart

The end has finally come for a class 140 with the serial 178-5. According to this website [link] she was put into service in 1960, so has been going at it for almost half a century. The site also states January of 2007 as the time when it was "z-gestellt", meaning that there was no use for the engine, but it was kept as reserve, though without receiving any maintenance. "z-gestellt" basically means that the engine is left standing around, but one may not remove any parts or do anything to it that might hinder it from being put into service again within a short period of time.

Now, the engine is history. I witnessed how the roof and side panels that were cut off earlier where taken to another place inside this area, where they'd later be cut up into smaller parts, while the workers cut through the bracings of the main components in the engine room. When most of the units where more or less disconnected from the base frame, the claw was used to literally rip them out. It was a strange experience to know exactly what was being removed, starting with the fan casings from the engine's cooling fans, continuing with the equipment racks. The claw is about to tear off rack no. 1, assuming that the engine is facing us with cab no. 1. After this, the casing for the oil's cooling fan was removed, followed by the air compressor.

I have many other pics of the destruction sequence, but they look more or less the same, and are probably only interesting to people who can tell an air compressor from a distance My crappy camera also managed to blur many of the pics (I still haven't got a tripod), so this is probably the best from the batch, unedited this time.

The class 143 in the foreground will probably outlive its counterpads behind it, or even the ones that are to arrive soon, as for some reason, the Bender always parks one engine at the end of the line, and dismantles all the others first. Last time, it was a class 151 [link] Whats also amazing is that the 143 in the foreground, or generally the class 143 is only half as old as the 140 and 110, but is still being scrapped. I wonder why...