Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: railways

Here 113003-8 is running around for the trip back to Tabor.

This is the station at Bechyne, which is surprisingly complete for such a small town. On the other hand, it is a terminus.

Here's an alternate shot on the wye, with better sky detail. It is interesting how much of a difference exposure control makes.

This was maybe the most important station on the route...it actually had a passing siding!! Generally, this line was one of the crudest electric railways that I've ever been on, but there were passengers on the train, to be sure, and there is something charming about primitive branchlines, even if modernization would encourage more "normal" (non-railfan) people to ride.

Here the train is entering the wye at Bechyne Zastavka, a request station that is the last on the line before Bechyne. The wye serves two purposes, however. A locomotive that can only be easily run in one direction can be turned around on it, it's true, but the Class 113 is a unidirectional locomotive, there's a passing siding at Bechyne, and most importantly, there's a freight customer on the wye.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

This was, if I'm not mistaken, the train that took me out to this station up in Koge, a town to the north of Copenhagen, on my way to stay the night in Fakse.

I took this on one of my many trips to London, and until I found it in my collection a few weeks ago I had forgotten completely that I had it. I figure it should fit nicely into the various rail-oriented groups on Flickr, and interest a number of people, so why not post it? :-)

Wagons-Lits are better known for providing sleepers and other luxury passenger equipment for the Orient Express, but indeed they do provide a full sleeper service to many carriers. RZD, the Russian Railway, is a major customer, and their sleeper trains, equipped with Wagons-Lits stock, connect Moscow and St. Petersburg to many Eastern and Central European cities such as Prague, Budapest, Karlovy Vary, and of course Berlin, seen here. This is a fuller, but less sharp, alternate of Picture 1.

Wagons-Lits are better known for providing sleepers and other luxury passenger equipment for the Orient Express, but indeed they do provide a full sleeper service to many carriers. RZD, the Russian Railway, is a major customer, and their sleeper trains, equipped with Wagons-Lits stock, connect Moscow and St. Petersburg to many Eastern and Central European cities such as Prague, Budapest, Karlovy Vary, and of course Berlin, seen here.