Quite a long compilation of videos showing the diesel shunters, which can be met around Gdynia, mostly around the harbour. Gdynia, as a city built from nothing in the 1930s, is full of very interesting architecture, and the way the city was planned is something very different from what we're used to. This is also applied to the railways, which was created parallely with the town. The sidings were planned out in a very unique way - they snake around tight curves, between buildings, on roads, throguh the middle of road crossings. Back in the day, the entire city was covered with a large net of sidings, which lead to every pier. Today it's quite different. The railways function only to the more important parts of the harbour. Often, when there's a train to the harbour going, a huge chunk of the town's traffic gets jammed for up to half an hour in some cases. I wanted to present Gdynia from this side. The railway molded perfectly into the urbanistic landscape, and not the modern and fast railways, isolated from the city with sound-absorbing screens, tunnels and viaducts.
On the videos there's a rather big collection of different locomotives operating around the harbour of Gdynia, mainly from one of the most classical classes - the SM42, loved by a lot, mainly these who don't have to drive them :). The famous locos have operated around this harbour since long ago. They were witnessing a lot of important political events happening around here, like the famous strikes. After the change of the system, the locomotives were given to a company, whose job was to operate around the harbour. It was then baught by CTL, which does shunting here up to this day. Not only its own, but in fact, all trains which are not of PKP Cargo. PKP uses its own shunters here. Lately, there started to appear the locomotives of the 6Dg class - a modernized SM42 (6D). They are completely overhauled, with a new cab, design, engine and everything else. We'll also see the siding to the PKP Cargo repair workshop, where we'll mit the SM42's working there along with a battery-powered ASF locomotive. Besides that, a DB Cargo locomotive appears from time to time - the DE6400. Engines of this class were produced for the Netherlands' state railways between the 1980s and 1990s. We'll also see one SM42 of Plata rolling with a container train of Cedrob.
Besides the normal diesel shunters of freight operators, we'll find also the famous locomotive belonging to Turkol. The SU42-536 is a heritage unit, painted with the SP42 paint scheme. It was leased to PKPIC to do shunting work around its wagon yard.
A lot of interesting sounds are here on video. The locomotives had to give their full power sometimes, to move the heavy harbour trains from the sidings to the bigger station. The most pleasant sounds are of course given off by the old SM42s when going into high rpm. We'll hear them all around Gdynia - on the siding to the northern conatiner terminal, on the siding to the power plant, on most parts of the harbour aswell as on entrance to the Gdynia Port GPA station. Besides that, we'll hear a couple of engine startups of the ols SM's and Turkol's SU42.
A lot of different types of cargo are transported to the Gdynia harbour Originally, the main line to the harbour was the famous "Magistrala Węglowa" going all the way from Silesia to export the Polish coal. Nowadays, more coal is getting imported than exported, but besides coal we can also see other interesting things. Containers, ashes, cement, molasses, liquids and smalls (which is lately being replaced by container transport)