Originally Posted by
Irish Steve
Didn't fly it, but I reckon the strangest thing I've seen was a fully operational Main line Diesel locomotive for Irish Rail that was shipped across the Atlantic on on of the Russian heavy lifters (an AN124 I think).
It took quite some work to get it out of the hold and on to the transporter that took it through Dublin to the maintenance base.
As to why it was flown over rather than coming by ship, as the rest of the order did, we never found out the reason for that.
IE Class 201 built by GM in North America. Timescale for delivery and introduction was very tight. If they all came by sea, there would not have been time to train all the drivers and maintenance engineers in advance of scheduled introduction. Flying the first one over gave a couple of extra weeks for the training programme so that the rest could be used almost from the dockside.
