Virtual Railfan Tour of Switzerland - Wednesday - Neuchatel Trams
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The downtown Place Pury terminus
Since 1976, there is just one tram line left in Neuchatel, and only 8.9 km long. This is the interurban route to Boudry, which starts in the centre of Neuchatel directly on the lake shore at the central Place Pury, where transfers to various trolleybus and bus lines are offered. The trams are some 38 years old and the track was getting very poor in places.
However, in recent years indications are that the city has decided to upgrade the system somewhat.
At Porte de Serriers a new platform with a passing siding has been built
At Place Pury the track has been rebuilt
The Porte de Serriers station was so new that there were no signs to even show which direction was which
Boudry
Boudry
The ride was much better after the work on the track. Rebuilding the track is fine but what about the old trams which were long life expired?
Last year there was news that the trams that had operated on the Trogen line out of St. Gallen had been sold by the Appenzellerbahn to Neuchatel. Picture above was taken at Trogen.
This picture of a former Trogen tram was taken in December 2019 ((Urban Transport Magazine)
There is a small tram museum but it has very restricted hours. On our last visit the tracks had yet to be reconnected to the rebuilt main line. The above video shows the historic trams
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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