Otaru Museum to dismantle two locomotives in August

[ED75-775]

Found on Facebook a few days ago and confirmed by the Hokkaido Shimbun, the Otaru City General Museum is planning to scrap electric locomotives ED75 501 and ED76 509 in August.

 

If the post is to be believed, the Museum has taken this decision on the grounds that both locomotives' electrical equipment and in particular the main transformers contain polychlorinated bisphenols (PCBs) which must be disposed of by law before 2027. Failure to do so apparently incurs large fines or prison time. Although I've seen some comments questioning why the affected parts couldn't be removed and safely disposed of, likely this would be a costly and time-consuming task which would have made the scrapping decision much easier.

 

While another ED76-500 has been preserved, ED76 505 at the Mikasa Railway Village where it has been safely decontaminated, ED75 501 was the sole member of its subclass and its destruction will leave Omiya-based ED75 775 as the sole remaining preserved ED75. Although two others were preserved, ED75 1 at the Shinkansen General Rolling Stock Centre in Sendai and ED75 39 at Takasaki Depot, both were dismantled in 2019 and 1998 respectively.

[bill937ca]

PCBs are the reason very few MP-54s were preserved in the US. We preserve trains not disease.

[kndy]

Hopefully they or another country will preserve it after the transformers are removed and disposed. 

 

America is a PCB case study in itself and Bloomington, Indiana and its residents are still suffering from it even though it was banned in 1979 and who knows what degree people in Los Angeles were eating food from PCB contaminated areas.

 

Japan should have been more strict before as thousands of people were poisoned back in 1968 in western Japan which was dubbed "yusho" (oil disease), as people were using rice bran oil to feed chickens which was contaminated by PCB's. 50 year study showed that Yusho patients have died of cancer/lung cancer.

 

But a lot of these things were all in part of corporate greed and negligence.

[ED75-775]

Quick update on this after some applied Google-Fu, but ED75 501 has been saved and decontaminated. Linked article features a paywall, but does give enough details: the ED75 has had the affected materials removed, while the unfortunate ED76 509 was scrapped and one cab saved for display at the museum. If I have read the visible section of article correctly, it was found that less equipment had to come out so it was actually practical to decontaminate rather than dismantle.

 

Hopefully this one-off locomotive will be placed under cover at some point too, along with the rest of the Otaru Museum collection.