In May 1940, my relatives had a few hours in Salt Lake City between trains. They had come from Denver via the Royal Gorge on the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad (often shortened to ‘the Rio Grande’) and would leave the same day on the Western Pacific, on an Read More …
The bookshop La vie du rail has moved. For many years, it was in a tiny shop in an obscure corner of a major Paris railway station, Gare Saint-Lazare, as shown here in my photos from ten years ago. But since my last visit, the bookshop seems to have moved Read More …
This large mural in the entrance hall of the Gare de l’Est (East Station) in Paris shows soldiers in August 1914 saying goodbye to their families and boarding a train to go into battle at the beginning of the First World War. The mural was painted in 1926 by an Read More …
No, I did not travel to the Royal Gorge in 1940. But my parents did, along with my maternal grandparents and most of my American aunts and uncles. This was no doubt my grandfather’s idea, to have a train trip to the Royal Gorge, Yosemite and San Francisco (for the Read More …
Currently there are about ten TGV trains per day going from Metz to Paris (and the same number from Paris to Metz) via the new high-speed railway line TGV-Est — provided there are no strikes in progress and the country isn’t shut down because of an acute pandemic, as in Read More …
The central railway station in Luzern (aka Lucerne), Switzerland, is at present a purely terminal station, meaning that all fourteen tracks end there. The only way for a train to leave the station is to change directions and go out the same way it came in. In former times, this Read More …
On the sidewalk in front of the Transport Museum (Verkehrshaus) in Luzern, they have set up the front end of ‘Sissi’, one of the four gigantic tunnel boring machines that were in use simultaneously for several years to create the Gotthard Base Tunnel, a flat rail route consisting of two Read More …
The Transportation Museum (Verkehrsmuseum) in Nürnberg is now officially called the DB-Museum because it belongs to the German Railway System (DB = Deutsche Bahn). It documents the history of the railroads in Germany from the beginning (which was right here, since the first line was between Nürnberg and Fürth in Read More …
Here is a typical scene along the Main River downstream from Wertheim. The things in the foreground that look like big mushrooms are actually moorings that the river barges can tie onto if they want to stop here for the night. On my bicycle tour in 2004, I stayed overnight Read More …
Gemünden is a town of some ten thousand people, located 42 kilometers downstream from Würzburg on the Main Valley Bicycle Route. Two smaller rivers, the Sinn and the Fränkische Saale, flow into the Main at Gemünden. I have cycled through Gemünden three times so far, once along the Main River Read More …