On the occasion of Austria’s EU Council Presidency in 2006 and in cooperation with the EU Presidency, this Austrian Railways Taurus 3 locomotive was constructed completely in the design of the Council Presidency logo. The ambitious aim was to increase the productive use of locomotives and make the change of the railway traction unit at the borders superfluous. The technology of the high-performance 1216 locomotive made it possible. The European Locomotive makes a decisive contribution to not only establish the interoperability in railway traffic technically but also practically. The locomotive was designed for operation on railway lines with a line voltage of 15-kV-16.7-Hz, 25-kV-50-Hz and 3-kV/DC. This way, the locomotive can, in principle, operate on the entire European standard gauge railway network. The model of the European Locomotive was created by pupils from the HTL Lastenstrasse Technical College, Klagenfurt.
