Virtual Tour (continued) Thursday - Blonay Railway Museum and Walking of the Cows
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Slight change of virtual plan. Paul has just arrived in Switzerland to spend a few weeks with me exploring the railways. The first day is spent at the Railway Museum at the Blonay - Chamby Railway Museum. We get there by taking the narrow gauge electric train from Vevey up to Blonay where we wait for the Museum train to take us the short run to the museum which is at Chaulin.
The Museum uses genuine Edmondson style tickets. the fare covers entrance to the museum.
We never know whether we will ride in an electric tram
or whether they will have fired up a steam engine
Today we have a steam engine
We ride on the balcony of the car so we can see the engine crew at work
The trip is short but there is a stop to admire the beautiful curved viaduct
There is a lot of interest for the railfan at the museum
Some of the visitors are interesting in themselves
Lunch was pretty good - prepared and served by volunteers
We chose a table with a view over Lac Leman and the mountains beyond
On the way back to Blonay there was a special stop on the viaduct while the crew blew down the boiler.
The trip back was, in many respects, the highlight. On the train to Blonay we fell into conversation with an American working with Nestle at Vevey. He told us there would be cows in a street procession at the next station south of the Blonay station. He had no idea how many cows or when. We decided to stop off at this station on our way back and caught the entire procession. I think the video explains it well. It is not exactly in the same league as the running of the bulls in Pamplona but much safer and a lot of fun. This is a tradition in many parts of Switzerland which has been carried on for centuries. It is known as Desalpes and marks the bringing down of cattle from the high pastures at the end of summer.
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What luck. we saw everything in the half an hour between one train and the next.
To see all the pictures I have taken at Blonay-Chamby click on the albums below:
Is that dual gauge track? Several photos look like a narrower gauge but the one photo looks like it has dual gauge. I wonder if those cows are the contented variety? :)
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
The weather was beautiful all day. The sky was blue and the few clouds were well above the mountain peaks. We had two objectives today. To ride the steam train between Triengen and Sursee and to meet up with our friend Ruth who volunteers on this railway. The second objective was to see the steam rack operation between Meiringen and Giswil. Getting to Triengen is not straight forward but a lot of fun. We took a main line train from Zurich HB to Aarau, then a local narrow gauge street tramway to Schoftland and a Post Bus to Triengen. The whole is delightful farming country and each item of transport adhered to the timetable. Local tram at Schoftland The ubiquitous Selecta machine is now paired with Lavazza and a photo machine, We like to have time to see the rooks nesting around the local church We arrived in good time at Triengen where the ticket staff were expecting us and pointed to where Ruth was working at the small coffee/bar counter. We had so much to catch up on that I...
Is that dual gauge track? Several photos look like a narrower gauge but the one photo looks like it has dual gauge. I wonder if those cows are the contented variety? :)
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