Uzbekistan: The timeline was announced by Batyr Kotyrev, Alstom’s Commercial Director for Western and Central Asia, at the “Railway Rolling Stock: Problems, Solutions and Prospects” conference held by Tashkent State Transport University from 20 to 23 April.
The KZ6A is a new freight electric locomotive that the French manufacturer will build at its EKZ plant in Kazakhstan. The locomotive will be based on the TraxxHauler platform (formerly Prima), like the single-section passenger KZ4AT and the twin-section freight KZ8A already in serial production at EKZ. The KZ6A will, however, use a different running gear arrangement—two three-axle bogies rather than two-axle—giving each section a Co-Co wheel arrangement, compared with Bo-Bo on the KZ4AT and KZ8A sections.
Power output of the six-axle, single-section KZ6A with asynchronous traction motors will be 7,200 kW, or 64% above the per-section power of the KZ8A. The locomotive will be 22.7 m long and weigh 150 t, with tractive effort of up to 570 kN and a design speed of 120 km/h.
Alstom announced the development of the KZ6A in 2024, when it signed a new agreement with national operator Kazakhstan Temir Zholy (KTZ). KTZ subsequently confirmed plans to order 205 of the locomotives. As Kotyrev pointed out, the KZ6A will functionally replace one of Kazakhstan’s most numerous Soviet-era classes, the VL80 electric locomotive, and may therefore find demand among other operators too. According to the local Association of Freight Rail Carriers, private operator DAR Rail, which runs VL80s, has indicated plans to procure around 110 locomotives.
