Nez Cassé 22254 sits in warm store in the Sotteville Graveyard with about 45 of its classmates.
Other than withdrawals due to accidents, none of the class were officially withdrawn until 12/01/2012.
About half of these stored locos survived and were cascaded to new roles.
The withdrawn classmates probably supplied spare parts at Rouen's Quatre-Mares (QM) Works next door.
22254 was one of the lucky ones.
The Nez cassé Série BB22200s were a class of 205 dual voltage Bo-Bo's built for high speed running on passenger services.
Prototype 22201 was delivered by Alsthom (now Alstom), in December 1976.
They rest were built in batches from May 1977 to 1980 and 1983 to July 1986.
They have a top speed of 200 km/h and a power rating of 5,600 kW (7,500 hp).
While built for French operations, a batch of 9 of them were used in 1994/1995 on Chunnel freights before the UK Class 92s were ready to take over.
Being one of the last built classes of Nez Cassé ("broken nose"), many are still working.
They are found on ICs, some TERs, at SNCF Infra and even a few still allocated to Fret.
History on 22254:
Big thanks as usual to Christophe Hespel for his trainsso.fr database 🙏
22254 was delivered to SNCF on 12/03/1978.
It was first logged in the Graveyard on 29/08/2010 and last logged there in August 2011.
Unfortunately, the arrival or departure dates are unknown.
Soon after August 2011, 22254 went into Quatre-Mares Works for a repaint and preparation for TER passenger services.
As at July 2026, it is active in the blue “PACA” livery working for SNCF working on TER services for STF “Hauts-de-France”.
