China Railways DFH mainline locomotives

The Dongfanghong, abbreviated DFH, was a family of four-axle diesel-hydraulic locomotives built in China for main-line work on China Railway. It began with the NY1 prototype, named Weixing, meaning Satellite, which the Sifang locomotive works in Qingdao completed in 1959 as a tribute to the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. The design resembled German diesel-hydraulic machines such as the DB Class V 200: two high-speed diesel engines each drove a separate hydraulic torque converter transmission, which kept the mass low compared with contemporary diesel-electric locomotives. The first DFH went into mass production in 1966 as part of China's first generation of main-line passenger diesels and worked trains such as the Beijing to Shenyang services. In 1976 Sifang began mass production of the DFH3, the first of the second-generation passenger diesels, with a driving cab at each end. Thirty second-hand DFH3 were sold to North Korea between 2000 and 2002, and a few DFH1 and DFH3 survive in museums at Beijing and Shenyang.