The Locomotives

To service the Menaggio to Porlezza and Ponte Tresa to Luino lines, six steam locomotives were built by Maschinenfabrik di Emil Kessler at Esslingen, Germany. Each locomotive carried the name of a notable person from the Swiss Ticino or Italian Como regions:

• no. 1 Stefano Franscini (Statesman and writer 1796-1857)
• no. 2 Giovanni Batiste Pioda (army colonel and politician 1786-1845)
• no. 3 Vincenzo Vela (sculptor 1820-1891)
• no. 4 Giocondo Albertolli (architect 1742-1839)
• no. 5 Bernardino Luini (painter c1480/90-1532)
• no. 6 Alessandro Volta (physicist 1745-1827)

0-6-4T locomotive

Four locomotives were 0-6-4T (0.3.2 in European notation) tank engines with two twin outside cylinders. The driving wheels were 1060mm in diameter and the trailing wheels 900mm. The 0-6-4T locomotives were 7.5 metres long, 3.5 metres high, and 1.85 metres wide, and weighed 13 tons. The water tanks ran along each side of the boiler from about 1 metre behind the smoke-box to the cab. The other two locomotives were 0-6-0T (0.3.0) tank engines and in appearance were simply shorter versions of the 0-6-4T locomotives, with a shorter boiler and a smaller cab aligned immediately behind the rear driving wheel. The locomotives had a maximum speed of 45 km/hour.

0-6-0T locomotive

In 1905 a short and unsuccessful trial of petrol engine light rail-cars was tried on both the Menaggio-Porlezza and Ponte Tresa-Luino lines. The motors of the rail-cars were subsequently removed and the former rail-cars were used as carriages for a while.

Locomotive no. 6 at Menaggio