Virtual Railfan Tour of Switzerland - Thursday - Schinznacher Baumschulbahn
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The Schinznacher Baumschulbahn is a garden center which has a railway running through it. It is open at weekends but is used for horticultural purposes during the week. The best way to get there is to take the hourly Post Bus from Brugg railway station.
There is an impressive workshop, crammed full of two foot gauge locomotives.
A tram locomotive
The steam locomotive of the day is on the ready track
The afternoon crowds can be heavy so several diesels are also available to haul trains.
Nice Edmondson card tickets are used
The garden center takes up a lot of room and the layout is very complex
Let's go for a ride behind this Henschel steam locomotive
Trains start and finish at this station
An interesting part of the ride is through the greeenhouses
Just imagine having lunch in a greenhouse and watching steam trains pass.
With lunch finished you can come to the lake and watch trains meet and pass each other
We have saved the best until last. An earlier picture in the shop showed a glimpse of a South African two foot gauge Garratt. It was difficult to photograph.
South African narrow gauge Beyer Garratt locomotive tucked away out of use
Although #60 has been used here it was found to be too big for the severe curves and too powerful for the small trains used. A couple of years ago it was sold to the Vale of Rheidol Railway at Aberystwyth, Wales where it has been refurbished and it was planned to have it in service on the Devils Bridge line this summer.
Happily this video was made of #60 in 2000
For additional videos of this garden center railway search Schinznacher Baumschulbahn on youtube
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
A Dutch speciality - pancake with cheese, mushrooms and bacon. This was the only picture I took today - after we had finally arrived at Den Haag. We went early to the station at Basel to check on our train to Dusseldorf only to find out it had been cancelled. A visit to the SBB ticket office revealed that the train hadn't actually been cancelled but was starting today from Karlsruhe. They found a connecting train leaving a little earlier which we took. This became progressively later and later so that it arrived at Karlsruhe just as the connection was about to pull out. A frantic dash across the platform and we were able to claim our seats. The journey to Dusseldorf was peculiar, There were periods when the train went fast (up to almost 200 kmph) and other periods when it dawdled. It progressively lost time except that it arrived at its final destination, Dusseldorf, eleven minutes early. (An injudicious use of recovery time in the schedule?) Dusseldorf gave us an opportuni...
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