Central de Aragon Beyer-Garratt Locomotives in Spain

Class 282-0401 "Garrafetas" (Locobase 783)

Data from [], the web site of the Spanish National Railway. (Thanks to David Monton, whose 3 December 2021 email explained the origin of "Garrafeta" Works numbers were 402-407 in 1931.

These six engines became RENFE class 282.0401. Several websites have noted that this class was better known as the Garrafetas, but no explanation as to why. One that seemed the likeliest was the simplest: that the locomotives operated in the Catalan region of Garraf.

David Monton, who wrote that Garrafeta means "Little Garratf in Catalan." He added the following details about these engines: "Hello: I am 61 years old and I traveled by Garrat locomotive when I was a child: from Tarragona to Lleida there was a train of tanks with

petroleum products and in the middle a US-style wooden car.

"Garratt locomotives have never worked on the coastline from Barcelona to Vilanova where the Garraf mountains are, which is a line without slopes."

They were tasked with pulling 500-metric ton trains up an 11-mile, 2.2% grade in 1 hour. That they met requirements is suggested by the decades-later order of 10 more engines in 1961 (282-0421 to 282.0430), making them among the last Beyer-Garratts to be completed.

Most of the class, said [] (visited October 2002), was used to haul long trains of oranges between Valencia and Tarragona.

NB: RENFE's tube & flue heating surface area as shown in the diagram is 1,948 sq ft, which derived from the tubes' inside diameters. When added to the firebox heating surface area, the resulting evaporative heating surface area came to 196.9 sq m (2,119 sq ft). Locobase uses the outside diameters given in the diagram, which simplifies comparisons of superheater ratios with Anglo-American inspired locomotives.

Class 462-0401 (Locobase 786)

Data from the [] website.A photo from [] shows a slab-sided Belpaire firebox. See also Justo Arenillas in "La material ingles en las pequenas companias", Lineas Del Tren (as reproduced on [], viewed 28 April 2003).

These Double Pacific Garratts pulled 300-ton express passenger trains up to Escandon Pass at 25 mph; ruling grade was 2.2%. Euskalduna built only two classes of Garratts and these were much the more powerful class. (Works numbers were 191-196.) See also a description of the locomotives held by El Museo del Ferrocarril de Vilanova i la Geltru, which notes that their home base was always either Alameda or Termino in the Valencia region.

By 1967, dieselization of passenger traffic pushed the Garratts off their unusual service, but they pulled freight trains on the same line for another four years.