Left: This photo, taken at the Sorocaba station in January 1992, shows two 3400 HP French locomotives, assembled in Brazil by EMAQ from kits supplied by Alsthom. The info and picture are courtesy of Stênio de Andrade Gimenez.

Right: A French Alsthom-EMAQ electric locomotive at Presidente Altino station. Original photo taken in 1993 by Emerson Santos. Copy courtesy of Ricardo Frontera.

These French electric locomotives were included in an ambitious electrification program of the FEPASA line between Araguari-Campinas-Mayrink-Santos that was being carried out since the seventies. A lot of problems, like lack of money and the bankrupcy of EMAQ, the Brazilian assembler of the locomotives, prevented this project to be completed. Only these two machines were built, to run at the former E.F. Sorocabana lines in 1991. However, their operation was not smooth. They are too sophisticated to run in FEPASA's bad tracks and to be fed by electromechanical substations built during the forties and fifties. So its maintenance is a critical problem. There still is dozens of locomotive kits, stored in FEPASA maintenance works along the railroad network, to be built. However, as FERROBAN give up on the electrification projects, they became only a too expensive scrap!... A similar waste of public money happened also in the Ferrovia do Aço (The Steel Railroad)...