What kinds of brake do IRs locomotives have?
Locos in India typically have air brake systems these days. As there is still a lot of freight stock, and some passenger stock that is not air-braked, many locos do have dual braking capability where they can deal with both vacuum braked and air-braked stock. For instance, the original WDM-2 locos were vacuum-braked. As air braked stock came into wider use, many of these locos were retrofitted with air brake systems as well, hence the WDM-2A locos have dual braking capability. Later locos such as the WDM-2B and most WDM-2C units have only air brakes. Almost all new locos (WDG-4, etc.) have only air brakes as the original equipment in most cases, although a few are now [9/01] being retrofitted with vacuum brakes because there is still a fair amount of vacuum-braked freight stock in use. The presence of air brakes or dual-braking capability is indicated by a number of ad hoc means, such as annotations (‘DB’, ‘Dual Braked’) or markings (thin blue stripes running along the bottom of a loco
