Virtual Railfan Tour Bolivia - La Paz and Viacha

 
This is the former railway station designed by Gustav Eiffel of Paris tower fame. Trains no longer come down from the altiplano into La Paz and it has been turned into the central bus station

Interior of the Eiffel building

An interesting part of La Paz is the Witches market where you can find all manner of different items such as llama foetuses.  A foetus should be buried in the foundations of each new building.  The stall holders are not too keen on people taking pictures but here they called me "caballero" instead of "senor".

So now the nearest railway is at El Alto uphill on the altiplano and the main workshops of the Oriental railway network is close by at Viacha. I made a few visits while working for the government.  It was surprising when I went there to see the security people at the main gate welding up wheel flanges for them to be turned down for further use. All metal work and supplies have to be imported so they make good use of what they have.





A derelict Hunslet diesel hydraulic brought down from Guaqui

Oops


This is a medical or ambulance car of some sort.


Arch bar trucks were still in regular use here, they were outlawed in interchange service in North America around 1940

This is the station at Viacha with a track inspection car about to set out on the line towards Arica.  We will look at this line next.







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

Travel to Hamburg

Image
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...
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