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Good day train lovers! In the last post in our series about the history of locomotives, we talked about the P36 and the DRB Class 41, two of the best-known machines from the last years of steam-powered engines. From a romantic point of view, those were the golden days of locomotion, when daring entrepreneurs and engineers crisscrossed the world with railroad networks and trains were symbols for freedom and progress. Trains needed to negotiate through difficult terrains with increasingly bigger loads, and at some point, engineers realized that steam locomotives had serious limitations in terms of power. As you know, a steam engine burns combustible (in the case of the locomotives, coal) in order to boil water so as to use the pressure caused by the steam to push pistons. In these engines, heat loss is a huge disadvantage that set serious limitations to their power. So they started working in internal combustion engines which, in its early versions, started using kerosene and gasoline as their fuel, until a nice gentleman called Rudolf Diesel patented his first compression ignition engine. After some more iterations, these engines improved its performance and reduced its size and weight enough to be mounted in a locomotive. Technically speaking, diesel is not the right term for a type of fuel, but a kind of engine. Anything that can power a diesel engine is called diesel by extension, and funny enough, these prototypes didnt run on petroleum-derived liquids but on peanut oil! Soon, the advantages of diesel engines started to become clear: they could be operated by just one person, where at least two were needed in the case of steam engines; a single crew could control many locomotives in a train, thus increasing dramatically its load capacity when needed. Diesel engines can be started and stopped almost instantly which means shorter and easier stops with zero fuel cost and no cooldown times. They needed less maintenance, could work in freezing cold, were easier to repair By 1925 there were already diesel locomotives implemented in the US, and they started spreading slowly to South America and Europe. The Second World War practically stopped the building and adoption of diesel engines, but when it passed, the whole world started enthusiastically adopting them. From the 70s onward, they became the new standard until the introduction of electric trains. Today were going to start with one of the first post-Second World War diesel locomotives: the TE3 (3 in Cyrillic alphabet), built in the USSR for the first time in 1953.
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