NOHAB.hu is the sort of railway site where a locomotive’s paint scheme, engine swap and last regular train can each earn their own paragraph.
The site centers on diesel locomotives built by the Swedish firm Nydqvist och Holm AB—NOHAB—and especially the M61 class used by the Hungarian State Railways.
Its historical starting point is 1960, when a 1,750-horsepower NOHAB demonstrator arrived in Budapest for trials. The locomotive used major General Motors Electro-Motive Division components, including a 16-567C prime mover, generator and six traction motors.
That demonstration led to one of Hungary’s most recognizable diesel classes.
The site then follows individual locomotives almost obsessively.
A railway photo archive with memory attached
The galleries are not anonymous train pictures. Captions record train numbers, locations, dates, overhauls, engine substitutions and changes in service.
M61 006, for example, appears on ordinary trains, track-renewal work and special movements. The page records photographs from the late 1990s and early 2000s, often with both 1024×768 and smaller 800×600 versions—an excellent little reminder of when bandwidth was a design constraint worth mentioning explicitly.
M61 010’s page documents both older and newer liveries and notes that its prime mover came from scrapped locomotive M61 003. A December 22, 2000 movement is described as part of the end of the regular NOHAB era, when the remaining locomotives were transferred away from Tapolca.
The site also spreads outward from Hungary. Separate galleries cover NOHAB-GM locomotives in Norway, Denmark and Sweden, including Swedish T41, T43 and T44 series machines and preserved demonstrators.
That makes NOHAB.hu useful to more than railfans looking for pretty photographs. It preserves fleet relationships, builder histories, component lineage and the everyday operational context that formal locomotive specifications rarely capture.
Old railway websites are often strongest exactly where official histories are weakest: what happened to this particular machine after overhaul, what hauled train 9709 that morning, which engine ended up inside which surviving locomotive.
Those details are too small for most books.
They are perfect for the Web.