Virtual Railfan Tour of Switzerland - Friday - Le Locle to Les Brenets - Ten Minutes of Pleasure
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Sign on the inside of the Les Brenets Express. "It is ten minutes of pleasure"
Les Brenets is a small town on the Doubs river which is here the border with France. To get there we take the standard gauge from La Chaux de Fonds to Le Locle and transfer to the narrow gauge railcar for the short run to Le Brenets.
Le Locle with the standard gauge transN train on the left and the Les Brenets railcar on the right.
The Italian-built railcar dates from 1950
The railcar has an 007 theme.
After a fairly long tunnel we pass a deer farm
After a third tunnel we enter Les Brenets
One of the original steam locomotives on the line is preserved within a glass case
The reflection from the glass makes it difficult to get a photo
This shed is where the railcars are kept
We were invited to take a look around
Les Brenets is an interesting town to look around
It is now time to return to Le Locle
The engineer's dog knows when it is time to depart. He sits between his master's feet during the trip
This is a cab ride of the return from Les Brenets to Le Locle
Note the unadvertised "station stop" at 3.50. Just before we reach Le Locle we can see the line from France coming in on the right.
The line to Les Brenets can provide a lot more than ten minutes of pleasure
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This is the only picture I took today - Hamburg Hauptbahnhof We took Air France from Ottawa to Paris with a connection to Hamburg. There was great chaos in the security section at Ottawa airport. One of my bags was diverted onto the intense search section and it was evident that with the speed they were going it would take a long time. I found a supervisor who explained and facetiously offered to get me a chair to sit on while I waited - which I facetiously accepted. After this it seems the whole process was speeded up and my bag was quickly released from the security prison. This made us late getting to the gate but a quick word with one of the staff at the gate in which I explained how my leg could be very painful if I had to stand up for some time and we finished up being in the first group to get on the aircraft after the wheelchairs. At Paris we had a long wait for our connection to Hamburg and this time one of the security staff came over and invited Paul and I to be first on the...
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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