Nose of the Nightcrawler

By request, we have here the nose of the Trans Europ Express locomotive. There's another one indoors in better shape, but I liked the outdoor lighting better. Unlike the prewar Union Pacific streamliners, this engine is not blessed with a giant grille on the nose, but it does have the rather odd exhaust stack jammed right between the windshields, giving them the feeling of actually having a nose between them.

Despite running through electrified territory, the early TEE trains were diesel powered. Since they provided international services, the technology hadn't been developed at the time of their inception to run off of multiple power supply systems, and many border crossings weren't electrified at all. Therefore, it just made the most sense to run them with diesels. Once the Swiss developed the first 4-system electric locomotive, these stylized diesel trains started to disappear. The death knell came in the 1980's when the TEE system was disbanded and replaced with the modern InterCity (for domestic services) and EuroCity trains for international routes.

This picture is unaltered.