at that time. United Kingdom 8 years after the death of Kandó, the engineering office of the Ganz Works won several British tenders, which were mostly based on Kandó's latest technology. British firms were entrusted with the implementation of these plans. There were plans to use the two-wire, three-phase, system on the Portmadoc, Beddgelert and South Snowdon Railway in Wales and the Metropolitan Railway in London but neither of these plans came to fruition due to the outbreak of WW II. Death and legacy Kálmán Kandó died at Budapest in 1931 but his work lives on. The ever-increasing strain of work, a series of family tragedies and, last but not least, the hassle of his life's work, the foreign bank loan that influenced the implementation of the phase-change system, all combined to strain Kandó's sudden health and on 13 January 1931. He died unexpectedly of heart failure. He did not live to see the final commissioning of his system, the realisation of his masterpiece, the locomotive he had designed. On 17 August 1932, the first phase-changing locomotive, V40 001, was tested by the engineers. After his death, the development of the electric locomotive continued on the path he had set, under the direction of Ferenc Ratkovszky and Andor Mándi. Many modern electric trains work on the same three-phase high tension AC principle introduced by the Kandó V40 locomotives, but the rotary converter is replaced by semiconductor devices. Three-phase powered electric motors allow for high traction effort even at great speeds and the difficulty of maintaining arbitrary speeds at full efficiency is eliminated by using IGBT semiconductors and the use of digital controls. The number of Kálmán Kandó's patents granted between 1895 and 1929 is 69. More than 50 patents were bought by locomotive and rolling stock manufacturing companies in foreign countries like the UK, USA, Germany, France and Italy. The patents are grouped around the topics of electric railway motors, multi-phase AC motors, automatic railway switching devices, overhead lines, phase converters, railway safety techniques and power transmission stations. In Miskolc, the square in front of the Tiszai railway station, where his statue is also standing, bears his name, as well as a vocational secondary school. In Budapest, the Kandó Kálmán Faculty of Electrical Engineering (formerly an independent technical college, now part of Óbuda University), also bears his name. The minor planet 126245 Kandókálmán was named after him. See also Three-phase