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 single island
Tuesday 23 August Paul and I travelled to Zurich on Air Canada via Toronto. The flight from Ottawa was over an hour late - luckily we planned for this with a three hour connection in Toronto. Toronto airport was disgusting. It was overcrowded and there was nowhere for people to stand while waiting to board their flights. Obviously the Toronto airport focusses on relieving passengers of their money. Once aboard the plane things went well. There was plenty of space for carry on and the flight was excellent. It seems that the problem with airline travel is the airports rather than the flights. Our flight landed four minutes ahead of schedule (Wednesday) which was 0800. By 0820 we had cleared passport control and by 0840 we had taken a connecting internal tram and found the tram to downtown. We could have taken the SBB trains but we were in no great hurry and we enjoyed the 35 minute tram ride to close to the hotel. At Gladbrugge we passed two SBB 6/6 locomotives on the main line close by
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
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