Single track

Fewer than twenty

budding · planted 2024-02 · tended 2026-04

The railway has about thirty main-line locomotives on its books. Fewer than twenty can run on any given day. The rest are waiting for a part, or for a heavy repair in Kazakhstan, or for a driver, or for the fuel. In the depot they call the waiting ones "the pensioners."

The numbers are public, from the annual report. What is not in the report is how a good mechanic will go round the yard at night and take one dead locomotive's alternator to another one's engine, and bring the other back after a week. See The 2TE10.