Year In Review: 2017

Another year has been and gone, so lets look back at 2017...

YouTube Channel

My YouTube channel hasn't really moved sadly
Lets have a squizz at how many train-related videos I uploaded last year:

Three videos... wow. The kicker is that I have two videos waiting to be processed/uploaded. Truth is I can't be bothered uploading them at this point in time due to file sizes and ISP upload speed restrictions at 2Mb/s. 1080p60fps videos are a larger file size than standard 1080p30fps and therefore require longer to upload. My last attempt took nearly 6 hours!

Rail In New Zealand

prepare for sarcasm in parts!

Starting with the basics. DL's are running rampant around the North Island (until they either break down next or they find more asbestos), making railfan's probably yawn and say "seen that loco already 6 times today". I found this written by Andrew Hamblyn - KiwiRail Locomotive Engineer, describing the DL class back in 2013:

"The landscape of the local railway scene has changed dramatically, and the introduction of the DL class has taken all the fun out of foaming, with their hee-hawing homo horns, borg-like character and reliability typical of cheap imported Chinese junk."

Onto brighter news now, the September 2017 issue of New Zealand Railfan, informs us that a selection of DC Class locomotives are being worked on to bring them up to acceptable standards to be used as unrestricted lead-unit locomotives. Most of the work has been related to cab safety.

Staying with the DC's, it appears that 25 of these ageing loco's will continue to operate into the 2020's. These loco's will be split 13 North Island, 12 South Island. At the time of writing the NI units are 4041, 4058, 4620, 4323, 4444, 4467, 4571, 4594, 4605, 4663, 4692, 4790 and 4951, with SI units numbered 4012, 4346, 4409, 4421, 4513, 4559, 4628, 4726, 4755, 4761, 4801 and 4853.