HIGHEST RAILWAY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 August 1939, Page 6

HIGHEST RAILWAY

SPECIAL LOCOMOTIVE BUILT.

BRITISH ENGINEERING ENTERPRISE.

An outstanding achievement of British engineering enterprise is the building of a Diesel locomotive to run on the highest railway line in the world, near La Paz, the capital of Bolivia.

The engine has now passed all tests, including the six-mile climb with a gradient of 1 in 14 along a series of sharp “S” curves from La Paz to the plateau 2 000 feet above the city and 16,000 feet above sea level.’ Built for the Peruvian Corporation, it will operate on a circuit where conditions are so severe that engineers have hitherto believed them to be beyond the powers of such an engine, which they thought would prove so cumbersome and costly (compared with the present electric traction) -as to be economically unworkable.

The Peruvian Corporation consequently placed a number of safeguards in their contract, and a firm in Leeds, Yorkshire, accepted the “challenge." The engine they built has now proved able to handle its load with case at the highest altitudes of the tortuous mountain track and to be exceedingly economical on fuel.

Special features of the locomotive are: supercharged engine. 330 horsepower. with exceptionally large radiator to maintain an efficient temperature at high altitudes where air density and conductivity arc greatly reducted; independently-fitted additional starting system, petrol-driven, to avoid any possible delay; and a quadruple system of brakes, working independently.