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 …
The train on the right, on track 4, is a first-generation InterCityExpress (ICE) which has been in operation since 1991. You can always tell a first-generation ICE because they have a decorative but dysfunctional hump on the roof of the dining car — but at least they HAVE a real Read More …
This new railroad station at Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe was opened in 1991 as part of the first high-speed InterCityExpress (ICE) line from Hannover to Würzburg. Here you can get trains going north to places like Bremen, Hamburg and Berlin, or going south to Frankfurt am Main, Mannheim, Stuttgart and Munich, for example. Read More …
Trains from the Gare de Lyon in Paris arrive once or twice an hour at Fontainebleau-Avon on what is now called the Transilien R line. Currently (as of 2021) a full-price one-way point-to-point ticket from Paris to Fontainebleau-Avon costs € 8.85. This does not include the bus from the station to Read More …
In this photo from around 1910, a train has just arrived from Paris and is waiting on the quay in Cherbourg. The photo, much enlarged, is now on display at the spot where it was originally taken over a century ago. The railway line from Paris to Cherbourg was inaugurated Read More …