2008

In the past year or two, I've done a lot with trams passing doorways and portals of different types, since many other people on Flickr have had very good luck with this type of composition. I took this shot in front of the Kostel sv. Vorsili, or St. Ursula's Church, on Narodni Trida.

This was, unless I'm mistaken, the start of my Kutna Hora trip, although I note that the number on this Class 471 "City Elephant" EMU doesn't match the one from my arrival photo. I don't remember which one I actually took, or if it was a twin set.

This was one of several photos I shot of the landscape and sky on my way to Kutna Hora. I tried to pick the two best ones, so I chose this one.....

I shot most of my Kutna Hora pictures on Ektachrome, and from the look of how grainy these shots are, grainier than any slides I've ever done, I'm assuming it was Elite 400, although I seem to remember it being 200. I really doubt that 200 could look this bad, though, at least at full resolution. Oddly, the main reason I'm not posting more of these is that most of them are going to end up in an NRHS slide show sooner or later. They're the main shots I have of this trip, so I'm hoping that the story and the subject matter will be more important than resolution....

....and this one. The main difference between these shots, as far as I can tell, is that this one has this weird effect created by the blurred tree in the foreground.

This is the Easter Market that was sort of my excuse for going to Kutna Hora. It was recommended, in fact, but the downside was that it was so crowded and disordered that I was unable to see most of the usual sites. That's the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin in the background, which I did get to peek inside of, but I never found the Sedlec Ossuary, or "bone church" where the interior is covered with fixtures made from the bones of plague victims. The Easter Market itself had some decent Czech food and beer, though, and I did get to spend a day walking around and seeing what I could see...

Easter is probably a more important holiday in the Czech Republic than most places, particularly in comparison with the United States, and many of the traditions are different. The junk food tradition, though, is not. Any Easter market will have large quantities of Easter pastries and candies, with stands like this one. This photo looks alright now, I think, but it was shot with the same bad film as most of my other Kutna Hora photos, and this one was not only grainy originally, but discolored, possibly from bad developer or fixer.

Here's the train that I took home. Worth noting in this photo is the ad on the side of the train, for a movie, Gympl, which glorifies grafitti vandals who trash trains. It's typical of the kinds of self-defeating ads that public transport services accept, and begs the question once again of why they're tolerated.

This was the start of my Tabor trip, taking the line down towards Ceske Budejovice out of Praha Hlavni Nadrazi. Here my train is departing Hlavni Nadrazi.

Here we're making our stop in Olbramovice. This station was newly rebuilt at the time due to the considerable corridor reconstruction over the past 2 1/2 years on this line, but given that the yard doesn't appear to have been redone at that time it's likely a lot more has been done since.

I just spotted this shot going through this particular roll of slides, and decided to include it simply because I like how it looks. The fact that snow was still on the ground in late March illustrates that, even in the global-warming era, rural Bohemia still has proper winters.

This was when I arrived in Tabor, where I had been a number of times before riding through, but had never noticed the size of this station. It sort of looks like a minor through or even branchline station that's been multiplied in length, and maybe that's what the architects intended in order to save money. Tabor is actually a terminal station and a junction, however, as the line the Bechyne originates here, commonly referred to as the František Křižík Electric Railway. This line happens to be the oldest in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, being constructed in 1903, but more on that in a moment...

Named after the church of the same name on Mt. Tabor, where Jesus is said to have revealed his identity as God's son. The original Church of the Transfiguration is long gone now, having been demolished in the 12th Century (a new church, the third to stand on Mt. Tabor, was built in 1924, and still exists today), but this church, in Tabor, Bohemia, was built in circa 1480-1512, and rebuilt in Baroque style in 1677. The church tower is open to the public, although the tourist information I've found says that you have to climb 250 stairs to get to the top.

The Stara Radnice, or Old Town Hall, is another of the architectural attractions of Tabor, having been built in 1521, with two reconstruction projects in the 17th Century (when it was rebuilt into Baroque style) and the 19th Century (1878, when it was rebuilt back into Gothic).

Tabor's castle, Hrad Kotnov, was built in 1420, although like many castles it has been rebuilt many times since. The tower is the only original aboveground part still intact. The current castle is more the product of the 1532 reconstruction, after it was burned down in a fire, and the 1613 reconstruction, when it was rebuilt into a support facility for a brewery, which was physically connected in 1844. The brewery remained in operation until 1981, and then the castle fell into disuse before being reconstructed, as both a brewery and tourist attraction, in 2004.

Here's my alternate shot of Hrad Kotnov. The foreground is a bit dark, I know, but I wanted to show the variation of architectural styles.

Now...back to the electric railway to Bechyne. This was the train I took, not the preserved original one (which does occassionally run railfan trips), but the modern one, however loose a sense. This Class 113 electric is probably about 30 years old or more, and would never normally be used for much but switching the yard of a large mainline station, but obviously it would be wasteful and bad for the track on this single-track branch to have a 163 or 363 class running this service. The dim light you see here is partly an illusion, as it was slightly gloomy out by this time of day, it was late in the day, and I only had 200 ISO film. This, however, was one of my last shots before I switched to Tri-X, which is 400.

I took a number of black and white landscapes on the way to Bechyne, simply because Tri-X was what I had in my camera, and not all of them were bad. This is one of my favorites.