The South African Railways Class of 1972 is a diesel-electric locomotive. Between March 1972 and May 1973, the South African Railways placed seventy Class General Electric type U15C diesel-electric locomotives in branch line service. Manufacturer The South African Class type GE U15C diesel-electric locomotive was designed and built for the South African Railways (SAR) by General Electric (GE) and imported. The first batch of fifty locomotives was delivered in 1972, numbered in the range from 35-001 to 35-050, with the first locomotives arriving in March. These were followed by a second batch of twenty in 1973, numbered in the range from to 35-070. The last locomotives arrived in May 1973. Class 35 series GE and GM-EMD designs The Class 35 locomotive family consists of five sub-classes, the GE Classes and and the General Motors Electro-Motive Division (GM-EMD) Classes , and . Both manufacturers also produced locomotives for the South African Classes 33, 34 and 36. The locomotive has interlinked bogies, hence the Co+Co wheel arrangement classification. The linkage is usually hidden from view by the saddle-shaped fuel tank. Distinguishing Features With the two GE U15C Class 35 models, the Class can be distinguished from the Class by the length of the humps on their long hoods, the Class having a hump that is more than twice as long as that of the Class . An externally visible modification which was done during major overhauls is the addition of a saddle hood astride the long hump of the Class . By 2013 this modification had been done on a large number of Class units, but no similar modification was done on any Class . Service South African Railways The Class 35 is South Africa’s standard branch line diesel-electric locomotive. The GE Class was designed to operate on light rail and they work on most branch lines in the central, western, southern and southeastern parts of the country. In the Western Cape, they work out of Cape Town on the branch lines to Bitterfontein, Saldanha and Caledon, and out of Worcester to George. A threesome is allocated to the Swartkops depot in Port Elizabeth from where they work the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) MetroRail commuter trains to Uitenhage. Zambia Between October 1978 and May 1993, Zambia Railways (ZR) hired locomotives to solve its chronic shortages in motive power, mainly from South Africa but at times also from Zaire, Zimbabwe,