The people who keep the refugee trains running out of Ukraine – photo essay
Ukrainian Railways employs more than 230,000 people, and almost all its employees have stayed in the country to work, making long, dangerous journeys every day to get people to safety...
NEPA’s PowerRail ships locomotive parts to Poland to aid evacuations
A Luzerne County-based railroad equipment company has provided equipment to help keep evacuation trains running back and forth between war-torn Ukraine and neighboring Poland. Paul Foster, PowerRail CEO, recently received a late night call that railroads in Poland were in dire straits, needing parts to keep aging Soviet-built M62 model locomotives running... The M62 was designed for heavy freight trains, with many of the locomotives being exported to Eastern European countries such as Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine as well as Cuba, North Korea, and Mongolia. There were 3,273 of the M62 engines produced from 1965 to 1990. According to Foster, the Poles had 10 operational locomotives and over time they were down to two working. When a locomotive would break down, parts were taken from the idled engines to keep the last two functional. “We have an agent in Europe that represents PowerRail and he was contacted by a Poland railroad saying they were desperate for parts,” Foster said. “They had 10 locomotives they were using for evacuation and when one would break down, they would steal a part from another and before they knew it, they were down to two fully operational locomotives.” Foster said there are no replacement parts in all of Poland...
