A strange place
Pradelle di Nogarole Rocca. A little town in the veronese flat lands near Mozzecane, stop on the line from Verona to Mantova. It's mostly known outside Italy - overall in Germany - for the existance of a busy reparation and overhauling railway locomotives factory, named IPE Locomotori srl. Since decades, this firm operates importing from outside Italy units of every dimension and type particularly designed to be used on industrial networks or on track maintenance services. Mainly these machines are built by german railway builders as MaK, Henschel, Deutz, Gmeinder, Esslingen, O&K, or units coming from german private lines or foreigner administrations like SNCB or DB. Even Badoni, Greco and Keller are logos usually visible on working lines of the society, which sometime works even on FS locos. In addition to importing and selling activities, another activity is customers assistance, with reparation service, loco replacing and other services. The building is located in the industrial area of the town, at the end of a closed street. Beside this street it's splitted the factory ground: in a wide open fenced area stand in apparent disorder many pieces of locomotives, cabs, hoods, engines, wheels, frames, with diverse forms and colors. This impressive lookout on a sort of an open spare parts seller let you understand how much the art of do-it-by-yourself, of adapting, rebuilding on these kind of locos is a must. Usually, infact, we are talking about foreign locos built in the 50's/60's, for which is difficult to find original spare parts that are replaced by pieces stored in this sort of sad loco cemetery. Still in the same are are parked some entire locos in nice shape, waiting a buyer. Other locos instead are partially stripped, without wheels, without engines, some have wheels under the ground of the area, like plinthed. In the other fenced area stands the repair building where locos are lifted on oil-pistons or parked on track parts. In front of the building many other locos stand alligned waiting to enter the reparation program or being worked outside the building. The more surprising thing - except the wide variety and huge quantity of locos - is the absence of a track linking this factory to the nearest railway station: infact every locomotives have to reach Mozzecane (as told before) on road-trailer behind a truck. This operation as you can guess in not easy, overall when locos are big unit with boogies. Finally an external painting room is located near the building. The place is one of those to be visited, mostly by those railfans interested in this kind of locomotives. To words, let's now take place to some images taken at IPE plant this April, 5th.