Laminátka…..Part 2

Remember the recent blog entry regarding my new PIKO HO scale electric locomotive? The one about the ČSD Class 499?

Photo by PIKO Spielwaren GmbH

Well, to my great surprise there are actually folks in the Czech Republic who find my blog interesting enough to read. Thanks!

One of them, “Zdenek”, forwarded an extensive history of the CSD Class 499 to me. It’s an eight page write up, including some nice photographs. It looked very interesting. Unfortunately, and no surprise there, it is in Czech.  Now my Czech language skills are a bit rusty: meaning they are non existent.

So I tried Google Translate. That turned out to be less than satisfactory. Some of the stuff Google Translate came up with in English was either rather comical or downright nonsensical. Who knows, perhaps the Czech railroad terminology just threw a wrench into the translation algorithm. But leave it to my other half to find a translation program that actually did work…mostly.

Etranslator did surprisingly well. Even though there were a few times were I was scratching my head trying to figure out what a sentence meant. Eventually I did manage to make sense out of it. A few passages were changed by me, but generally I left the English translation alone. It makes for a good giggle here and there…

In order for all this translation magic to work, the photographs needed to be stripped out of the Czech version. Thus I have linked the original Czech article, including the photographs, into the blog first. Followed by the English translation.

Vozidla – Lokomotivní řada 230

Laminatka (English)

A few explanations:

Czechoslovakia was dissolved in 1993, creating the Czech Republic (since 2016 called Czechia) and to the south the Slovak Republic.

The railroads in Czechia are the ČD:

In the Slovak Republic it is the ZSSK:

A map of the ČD rail lines:

A map of the ZSSK rail lines:

Credit for the Czech language article and photographs goes to:

As usual comments are much appreciated!