SNCF Class BB 25500

The SNCF Class BB 25500 is a class of dual system electric locomotives built by Alsthom for the French national railway SNCF. The number is the sum of the BB 17000, the alternating current version, and the BB 8500, the direct current version. Like those two classes the locomotives have monomotor bogies with two different gear ratios, giving either increased tractive effort for freight or a higher top speed, which makes them suitable for both freight and passenger trains. They were built in three distinct batches with detail differences and remain in use as mixed traffic locomotives, mostly on TER and Transilien services. Ten locomotives were exported to Romania, where they work with former SNCF Rio carriages for a regional operator and were renumbered by adding 400,000 to their SNCF numbers. One of them caught fire on 5 December 2017 while hauling a freight train, and locomotive 25609 is preserved at the Cité du Train in Mulhouse.