Virtual Railfan Tour of Switzerland - Sunday - Vevey to Les Pleiades


A train to Les Pleiades in the platform at Vevey. To the left is No. 73 a historic car built in 1970

The Chemins de fee Electriques Veveysans is a metre gauge line worked on 850V DC.  It is in two parts. The section from Vevey to Blonay is an adhesion line with local  and commuter traffic.  The section from Blonay to Les Pleiades is worked on the Strub rack with a maximum gradient of 20%. Blonay is the junction point for the historic trains to the Blonay-Chamby Museum.


You never know what you will find lurking in the sidings at Vevey. No. 82 is a locomotive built in 1938

Across from the narrow gauge platform is the SBB main line. Here a Re 6/6 hurries a westbound freight towards Lausanne

At Blonay even the adhesion section can be pretty steep

Some of the trains are decorated

A meet at Blonay. The line is part of the MOB system and some of the cars have the Golden Pass livery


Blonay looking towards Les Pleiades. This is an operating day at the museum and there are historic cars waiting to take visitors to the museum

A new train at Les Pleiades

There is a good restaurant here but be prepared to pay cash even though they technically accept credit cards.  Their system works by radio to Vevey.  When we went the system was down because they were out of contact.  We only just had enough cash to pay our bill .

Les Pleiades is not above the treeline and so views are restricted.

One striking item at Les Pleiades was the loud cow bells

However the cattle were not as noisy at Les Pleiades as they were one Sunday at Blonay when the cows were brought down from the mountain to their winter pastures.

Back at Blonay, after finding a cash machine there is time to enjoy the lake.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Railfan Tour of Switzerland - Wednesday - Zurich Hauptbahnhof Part One

Image
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...
Read more

Coming Home - Wrap Up - Sunday 15 Setember 2024

Image
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  
Read more

Travel Basel to Den Haag - Wednesday 11 September

Image
  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...
Read more