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 …
In the winter of 2019/2020, I took four short city-and-opera trips (three days and two nights each time) by train from Frankfurt. This was something I used to do fairly often in December and January, because I typically had fewer teaching commitments in those months than in the months before Read More …
This is the Nancy train station as it looked in 2017. There are no direct trains from Frankfurt to Nancy, so I usually take the TGV from Frankfurt to Strasbourg and change there for a regional train to Nancy. This takes three hours and 46 minutes, including 19 minutes in 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 …