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 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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