Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: praha hlavni nadrazi

I don't remember exactly when I took this, but I'm fairly certain it was in late 2005. One way or another, it's one of my better shots of Hlavni Nadrazi, the main train station for Prague, with a little bit of the "Sherwood Forest" yard. If you need to ask why it's called that, you don't want to know. The locomotive doing switching is, if I'm not mistaken, a CD Class 111 electric.

Here's another, much wider, shot of Hlavni Nadrazi, albeit a dark one. I apologize for the darkness of this shot! :-)

Class 451 and 452 EMUs are a necessary evil of travelling on Ceske Drahy. They're noisy, old, dirty, slow, rough-running, heavily vandalised, and laughably out of date, but they're often the only trains working the line you need to travel, and they rarely break down, actually. Here Ceske Drahy #452 013-6, a 452 Class EMU, waits to work a local service to Benesov U Prahy.

The yards and grounds surrounding Praha Hlavni Nadrazi are called "Sherwood Forest" by locals, referring to the near total anarchy there. The police are everywhere, but that doesn't reduce the public urination and defecation, the rampant vandalism, assault, robbery, and other much more awful crimes committed there, not to mention the unwillingness of any of the vagrants there to be even moderately sanitary. The whole station is slated for a rebuilding, which is already in its beginning stages, although there is still so much vandalism that I'm not sure what the point is. Anything built will be immediately trashed before it's even completed. There are also a lot of abandoned outbuildings in the yard, like this one. I shot this from a train waiting to depart.

Here's...yet another Class 452 shot!! #452014-4 is waiting in this picture to work a service Praha Hlavni Nadrazi-Benesov U Prahy.

This is one of the express trains for Ceske Budejovice, and on this particular day (January 26th, 2007) it looked like it was all set to be packed to standing room only with skiiers, in spite of having over 10 cars on.

Here's a shot of train #R641 for Ceske Budejovice, waiting for it's locomotive at Praha Hlavni Nadrazi. There are so many coaches on to accomodate unexpected ski traffic that you can't see to the end!!!

Although the station has too many tracks for it to cover all of them, the inner platforms of Hlavni Nadrazi have a fair-sized train shed.

Praha Hlavni Nadrazi, while much-maligned today because of its dilapidation, was nevertheless originally built in a spectacularly monumental style, in keeping with other big city stations of the time. Much of it is still there, too, but above street level and off to the side of the tracks, where there are offices. This part, though, is open to the public, as it houses the landmark Fantova Kavarna coffeehouse.

In spite of Fantova Kavarna being open to the public, this shot illustrates how difficult it can be to get the right range. I actually shot this from the pedestrian tunnel that leads to the tracks, as there's a huge hole in the ceiling to remind you of what's upstairs. That's understandable, since the tunnel system under the station used by most passengers is more or less universally considered ugly, whereas Fantova Kavarna, flaking plaster notwithstanding, is a whole other story.

It's hard to see in this photo, but we're actually looking down the north throat of Sherwood Forest (Hlavni Nadrazi) Yard. Praha Hlavni Nadrazi, while a major terminus, is nevertheless a run-through design, with trains north to Decin, Dresden, and Berlin going this way, and trains to Benesov, Ceske Budejovice, Plzen, Brno, and Wein going the other way (please correct these directions if I got them wrong, I'm shooting them off by memory :-)).

This is an alternate shot to Picture 1, which is easier to see because it's shot on the outer tracks outside of the train shed, making a good exposure much easier.

Here's a view of Praha Hlavni Nadrazi from the north, although regrettably there wasn't much getting around the fence and still getting such an expansive shot. Safety first, I guess.

I originally shot this with Ektachrome E100GX, one of the nicest color films you can buy if you can't get Kodachrome 64 or 200. On this particular day, though, during the Prague snowstorm two weekends ago, Hlavni Nadrazi, the main train station, was so obscured in the snow that the scene was, for practical purposes, a black and white scene. Seeing the scans of my two brackets, I decided to go with the lighter and hazier one for dramatic effect, and oddly, convert it to black and white. Why not? I think it looks better this way. Maybe some of you can tell me what you think, and I can consider uploading other versions of this.