About five years after the completion of the 0-8-0 cogwheel steam locomotive HG 4/4 # 704 in 2018, which was brought back from Vietnam, the almost completed sister locomotive HG 4/4 # 708 could be shown in the Uzwil workshop of the Dampfbahn Furka Bergstrecke (DFB) on the Open Day. Both 800 hp locomotives for meter gauge were built by SLM in Winterthur for the Thap Cham-Song Pa line in then French-occupied Indochina (today Vietnam) in 1923 and 1930 respectively, and were brought back to Switzerland more or less as scrap in the "Back to Switzerland" campaign in 1990. Rebuilding the locomotive with about 50% new parts took many years and thousands of man hours of work. Locomotive # 708 is scheduled to return to service on the Furka Mountain Steam Railway in August 2023, but time is short until then. At the moment, among other things, boiler insulation, boiler cladding sheets, most of the steam lines, many lubrication lines, brake rods, steam dome cladding, fittings in the driver's cab, etc. are still missing.
