International Railroad Discussion > Havana, Cuba - Nov 20th

Here are a couple of scenes from Estacion Central - Havana Central Station, taken on Nov 20th

FIAT 2 car DMU set and a new Chinese built 6-axle 52501 were keeping company with an ex Canadian National GMD-1

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They look clean and cared for. What was your impression of the state of the railroads in Cuba?

Don Hall
Yreka, CA

Impression was actually "well organized" Don !!

There was organized chaos with the crowds waiting to board - but boarding and such was calm !

The appearance of the locomotives lent credence to the fact that employees are trying their hardest to keep clean what they have.

Only part of the system I saw was Havava Central Station and a small piece in Matanzas - rest of the time was on the beach . sorry !

Um, there's Havana...then there's the rest of the country. I railfanned the place in 1980 and 1981, when Havana Central Station was the domain of Russian-built RSD-1s and depowered RDC's.

All you needed to do was go about 50 kms east on the mainline toward Santiago and the railroad scene was pretty dismal...lousy track, few freight trains and 1-2 mainine passenger trains a day...in short, a railfan's paradise. We saw, rode and photographed Baldwin switchers, EMD G8s, MLW-built FA2s, an RSD3, the ex-NJ RS2s plus running RDCs, scads of steam locos from all the Alco builders plus Baldwin, Porter and Vulcan in four different gauges...and Brill motor cars providing local service on branch lines. Then there was the Hershey Electric...a wonderful relic of the 1920s interurban era. Friendly employees everywhere except Santiago, where we also photographed the last of FCC's mainline steam engines (in a scrap line).

The feeling back then was that Havana had all the fancy stuff and the junk was shoved out of sight down-island. Fine with us.

The best railroad towns in Cuba are Santa Clara, the big junction about 150 kms from Havana and San Luis, a junction town near Santiago. The latter was "Alco haven" in the early 1980s.

If you are in Cuba legally (which I was all three visits), stopping by the US Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy (on the Malecon in the old US Embassy building) is a must...the $15 tee shirts sold by the US Marine Guards there are "must have" souvenirs.

BTW--got there and back in 1980 on a chartered DC3. 1981 we chartered a Turbo Commander for the trip down and a DC3 for the return. In 1992 I flew in a Haitian-registered 727-100 and came home on a Miami Air 727-200 charter...an aircraft that was about to enter long term charter to the US Bureau of Prisons for "ConAir" service. In 1980 and 1981 there was still a railroad crossing at grade on the main runway at Havana-Jose Marti International Airport. On my 1992 trip, I noticed a recent shoofly around the runway.

Alco251 Wrote:
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> Um, there's Havana...then there's the rest of the
> country. I railfanned the place in 1980 and 1981,
> when Havana Central Station was the domain of
> Russian-built RSD-1s and depowered RDC's.
>

The "RSD-1s" that you're referring to are called "TEM2" (both in Russian and Cuba), and only bear external resemblance to the RSD-1

ChS7-321 Wrote:
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> Alco251 Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Um, there's Havana...then there's the rest of
> the
> > country. I railfanned the place in 1980 and
> 1981,
> > when Havana Central Station was the domain of
> > Russian-built RSD-1s and depowered RDC's.
> >
>
> The "RSD-1s" that you're referring to are called
> "TEM2" (both in Russian and Cuba), and only bear
> external resemblance to the RSD-1

External resemblance only? You gotta be kidding. I have ridden them, chased them, photographed them all over Cuba; that's one hell of an Alco 539 imitation they do when you pull the throttle out. The cab interior looks just like a Schenectady product, right down to the tounge-and-groove wooden panelling. I can even recall the first time I heard one of the Russian units kicking cars in a small yard east of Havana. We heard the unit long before we saw it...it was two tracks away, behind a bunch of cane cars...and we were certain we hand stumbled upon a product of the Auburn, NY engine plant until the loco emerged in full view.

IIRC, the Russian-built prime mover is a 539 duplicate, copied from some of the MRS-1s they got their hands on after WWII.

When I was on my 2nd Cuba railfan trip in 1981, we went back to Hershey shops at Camilio Ciefuegos to revisit the ex-Naperville Jct. RS2s we'd photographed the previous year. Locomotive dealer/railfan Tom Lawson presented the shop foreman with a complete photocopy of an Alco 244 engine maintenance manual. Both RS2s looked and sounded great, and had been running around for years in Cuba with "seat of the pants" maintenance on their 244s...a stunning discovery for us, given the flawed history of that Alco product in USA applications.

In another discussion with mechanical forces (at San Luis, in eastern Cuba next to a tough mountain operating area), we were told that the EMD G8s--delivered right before the Revolution--were the toughest, best-built locomotives they had ever seen.

My apologies.....I goofed, and for some (stupid) reason was thinking of something else when I read "RSD-1".

>
> IIRC, the Russian-built prime mover is a 539
> duplicate, copied from some of the MRS-1s they got
> their hands on after WWII.
>

The TEM2's are derived from the Alco switchers supplied by the United States to the Soviet Union during WWII as part of the Lend-Lease program.
This type is currently one of two main types of switchers used on the railroads of the former USSR.

I'm not sure how the locomotives supplied to Cuba compare to the ones built for domestic use.

The new Chinese-built locos are themselves derivatives of some of the later Soviet developments (most notably, the TEM7).

Thanks for some fascinating pictures (and discussion as well!). Does anyone know what happened to the locos imported from Britain in the mid-60s? They were I believe almost identical to the British Rail Class 47 - Co-Co built by Brush, with a 2750hp Sulzer engine.