back from Vietnam - part 2 (Vietnamese Trains)

[Terpe]

Good read Ian. Very interesting.

Wonder if you travelled on any of the trains I worked on

[Englishman2010]

Good read Ian. Very interesting.

Wonder if you travelled on any of the trains I worked on

Thanks Terpe

We went on the SE2 from Saigon to Da Nang, SE7 from Da Nang to Nha Trang and the SNQ1 from Nha Trang to Saigon, if that's any help to you

[Terpe]

Thanks Terpe

We went on the SE2 from Saigon to Da Nang, SE7 from Da Nang to Nha Trang and the SNQ1 from Nha Trang to Saigon, if that's any help to you

At the risk of sounding slightly 'geeky', SE2 and SE7 designate "trainset types"- with the SE prefix indicating top quality trainsets.

The odd numbers run in one direction and the even numbers run in the other. So SE2 runs from Saigon to Hanoi and SE7 runs from Hanoi to Saigon.

There's a heck of a lot of different types of rolling stock in Vietnam, and I worked on both locomotives and coaches during one of the major refurbishments.

Most of the locomotives I worked with were either their Romanian built diesel hydraulic units (D11H), or their Czech built diesel electric. (D12E)

As I recall, nearly all the coaches were quite old and originally from China, but looked OK once fixed-up and repainted.
I won't go into the designations and numbering of the coach types. That really would be too geeky.