Virtual Railfan Tour of Switzerland - Sunday - Funiculars at Locarno, Vevey and Glion
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Today we finish the tours of the funiculars we have visited.
The meter gauge funicular Locarno - Madonna del Sasso links the center of Locarno with the pilgrimage sanctuary of Madonna del Sasso and the municipality of Orselina. There are three intermediate stations and at At Orselina there is a connection with the cable car to Cardada, which in turn connects with a chairlift to the summit of Cimetta.
At Orselina there are good views over Locarno and Lake Magiore
The meter gauge Vevey - Mont Pelerin funicular runs through the vineyards and has two intermediate stations
From the top there are good views over Vevey-Montreux and Lac Leman
This video shows the switches with no moving parts as well as the winding mechanism
The Glion funicular has good connections at the lower station with the trolley buses as well as the SBB local trains. On the right is one of the original cars which has been preserved in place.
The top station connects with the Rochers de Naye mountain railway which we will visit later.
Glion is an interesting community in itself albeit built on the side of a mountain
However, the signature view is that over Lac Leman towards Villeneuve and the Chateau de Chillon.
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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