[SE] Two former ore locos return to Malmbanan this summer

[JonasB]

This summer the Swedish Railway Museum and LKAB will have an event in Kiruna as the northern part of Malmbanan celebrates 120 years and it is the last year with Kiruna's old town centre. Two former ore trains locos, one R and one Dm3, will return to Kiruna to do what they were built for. Pull heavy ore trains.

The R was ordered in 1909 to haul 1400 ton trains on the steep part west of Abisko which they did for a bit over a decade until the line was electrified. The Dm3 is a three part electric locomotive built to be able to pull 5200 ton trains and were in use until 2013 when the Iores replaced them.

On Sunday morning July 3rd, the R and the Dm3 will haul an ore train each from Kiruna to Vassijaure

Read more: https://www.lkab.com/sv/nyhetsrum/l...rnvagsmuseet-och-lkab-i-kraftfullt-samarbete/ (In Swedish)

R 975 in Abisko in 1920:

 

[StephenHunter]

There's an American steam loco (Reading Northern 2102) that's going to be used to haul coal trains there too.

 

[Eviga Resande]

Those Rs will be a sight to behold. Still find it utterly crazy as a 'forsvenskad' Brit that the whole town has been moved to allow the mining to continue. 30,000 people I seem to remember?

Kiruna will always hold a place in my heart since I installed the town/kommun's new library system many years ago!

 

[jamesontheroad]

Those Rs will be a sight to behold. Still find it utterly crazy as a 'forsvenskad' Brit that the whole town has been moved to allow the mining to continue. 30,000 people I seem to remember?

There is a kind of pragmatism that characterises southern/caucasian/Swedish thinking about the north (one which is frequently in conflict with indigenous Sámi ways of thinking of landscape and the environment). If a building or a town needs to move, then let's work out how to do it. Not much sentimentality if there is money to be made.

On a smaller scale, Swedes have been used to moving individual buildings for centuries. My neighbours' farmhouse was originally built about 40km west of here and then disassembled and moved on horse drawn sleds to its current site. Last summer I got a tip-off from a colleague that a house was being moved out of Teg, in the inner suburbs of Umeå, to a new site in the countryside. The original site will be redeveloped for more lucrative apartments. The company that handled the move are experts in jacking up and safely moving entire timber framed houses, sometimes hundreds of kilometers. These photos was taken on the evening of 21 June, as the longest summer day came to an end, when the house trundled past IKEA onto the E4...

 

[XAM2175]

If a building or a town needs to move, then let's work out how to do it. Not much sentimentality if there is money to be made.

It's an interesting comparison to the times Australian towns were simply demolished to allow mining to continue