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The 4506 is back again !

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After several years of absence and a maintenance-repair of its engines,

the railcar 4506 is back on the rails of the Chemin de Fer du Bocq.

For several months, the 4506 railcar (more information on the 4506 railcar) had been the object of all the attention of volunteers in the Saint Ghislain workshops; these various interventions were described in one of the previous blogs.

On the evening of Thursday 4th August, the railcar was loaded onto a lorry and the exceptional convoy travelled at night between Saint-Ghislain and Spontin.

On Friday 5 August, it was barely 6am, the sun was just rising and already volunteers and the transporter were busy working around the machine.

a passenger train that is sitting on a railroad track

With the help of a shunting locomotive and a flatcar, the railcar is slowly lowered from the truck and is once again on the rails of the Chemin de Fer du Bocq (video 1 and video 2).

The time to reconfigure the trailer and it is then the railcar 554.18 (more info on the railcar 554.18) that climbs on the truck (video 1). It will be taken back to our workshops in Saint-Ghislain where it will undergo the necessary evaluation in the coming months in order to make it operational again.

a train that is sitting in the grass

It’s barely 9am, everything is finished, we still have to prepare for the day’s traffic… and to prepare the 4506 railcar (checks, homologation, cleaning, installation of the sound system, etc.) so that it can soon run “on the 128”.

Congratulations and thanks to all the PFT volunteers who made the return of the 4506 to the Chemin de Fer du Bocq possible!

(Photo credits: C. Woiche and M. Lorent)