Virtual Railfan Tour of Switzerland - Sunday - Public Historic Excursions
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Summer Sundays are always a busy one for the railfan, especially the first Sunday in the month. There are usually a number of excursions with historic rolling stock, many of them unadvertised. The casual visitor is likely to miss a lot or just come across trips by chance. Some of the larger railways operate historic excursions which are shown in the public timetables. We will take a look at a couple of these today and tomorrow will look at some that we happened to come across.
The Bern - Lotschberg - Simplon (BLS) railway, and many others, put aside a few items of outmoded locomotives and runs them from time to time. This is one advantage of electric power, there is relatively little to go wrong.
BLS 205 with an excursion at Interlaken - note the length of the train
Another BLS excursion at Interlaken. The Re 4/4 is still in regular freight service but it is pretty much a historic unit anyway
We found out details of a BLS historic excursion from Bern to Brig via the Lotschberg tunnel. It was advertised in the public timetable as a regular service train so we decided to take a look. The train rolled in and we found seats and were amazed that only the regular fare was charged - our Swiss Passes gave us free travel.
There was a special stop for photographs at Hohen where there were excellent views over the valley
The trip terminated at Brig and we took the opportunity to take a service train to return to Bern. BLS 205 is an Ae 6/8 built in 1939. Cab rides were possible - for a thousand dollars or so.
Even more remarkable is the Rhaetian Railway (RhB) excursions between Davos and Filisur using a narrow gauge crocodile. These operated every day in the summer, making two round trips. Again the regular fare was charged, so we went free with our Swiss Passes.
At Davos the lady conductor, in period uniform, talks to the crew of 414
RhB 414 is a GE 6/6 crocodile built in 1929. Along with 415, it is still regarded by the railway as a service locomotive
Running round at Filisur
What was really amazing was that we were able to ride the rear platform for the entire way back.
To finish off today we will just show a few videos of 414 in action.
Zurich Hauptbahnhof Paul has prepared some extensive notes and photos of the Zurich Hauptbahnhof. This will be in several parts. The busiest station in Switzerland is Zurich Hauptbahnhof (Zurich HB) which is used primarily by the SBB. It has 26 tracks serving almost 3000 trains daily and it is one of the busiest stations in the world. It was built in the 1870s and is a main shopping destination as well as a transport hub. There are three levels for platforms and the "Shopville" shopping plaza. The river Sihl river passes right through the station with platforms passing above and below the river. This shows the general layout of the station with the surrounding tram tracks shown in purple Tracks 3 to 18 are terminal tracks located at ground level, served by two side platforms and seven island platforms. These are used by long-distance trains from throughout Switzerland, and by international trains. Tracks 21 and 22 are underground terminal tracks, served by a sing...
This video, by Noel Wyler, shows what we have just missed. Last Saturday (14 September) the Oensingen Balsthal Railway organized an event to commemorate 60 years of the Re 4/4 locomotives. They brought together 24 of them and ran them as one train. Paul and I flew home on KLM from Schiphol Airport. We took a train from Den Haag directly to the airport. The trip back was marred by a couple with a young boy who was obviously teething. He cried almost continuously for the full six hours. I found I could tune him out when I dug deep into the KLM sound system and found a treasure trove of classical music. Bach violin concertos, Mozart piano concerto No. 23, Beethoven symphonies, Schuman etc. We survived the stupidities at the entrance of the Montreal airport and caught the KLM bus back to Ottawa where we arrived precisely on time. A good ending to a wonderful, tremendous, trip
This is the only picture I took today - Hamburg Hauptbahnhof We took Air France from Ottawa to Paris with a connection to Hamburg. There was great chaos in the security section at Ottawa airport. One of my bags was diverted onto the intense search section and it was evident that with the speed they were going it would take a long time. I found a supervisor who explained and facetiously offered to get me a chair to sit on while I waited - which I facetiously accepted. After this it seems the whole process was speeded up and my bag was quickly released from the security prison. This made us late getting to the gate but a quick word with one of the staff at the gate in which I explained how my leg could be very painful if I had to stand up for some time and we finished up being in the first group to get on the aircraft after the wheelchairs. At Paris we had a long wait for our connection to Hamburg and this time one of the security staff came over and invited Paul and I to be first on the...
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