The arrival of an interloper from the steppes of central Asia is the surest sign yet that Poland's broad gauge heavy freight railway is looking to the future with optimism. Trials of a Kazakh-built GE Transportation TE33A diesel locomotive on the LHS corridor began last month after loco No 9999 arrived in Slawkow on April 24. Completed in 1979, the 400 km route from the Ukraine border to the Katowice area is Poland's only 1520 mm gauge main line, although another corridor runs from Ukraine into Slovakia. At one point towards the end of the Second World War, broad gauge tracks were laid almost as far as Berlin before 1435 mm was adopted across Poland. A combination of politics and technical challenges has ensured that the break of gauge between the 1520 mm and 1435 mm has never quite fallen off the agenda in central Europe, but the LHS corridor is neither a Soviet-era anachronism nor an accident of history.
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