Where Worlds Collide

This is the first of a series of blog postings covering my European wanderings to fill in the time between Odin Dragonfly and The Reasoning.

Luxembourg was my first overnight stop. It’s the smallest nation in the EU; the entire country is about 40 miles long. This gives a rather unique flavour to Luxembourg’s main railway station in that almost all the trains begin and end their journeys in another country. That means Luxembourg’s own trains are outnumbered in their own country by French, Belgian and German ones. There are also three different voltages of electrification involved, and I’m not at all sure how they cope with that. I assume there’s switchable catenery involved.

The other big difference between Luxembourg and Britain is that almost everything is loco-hauled.

I took these photos in the hour I had waiting for my train to Switzerland in the morning.

One of the few non-loco hauled long-distance trains is the Paris TGV. Here we see an iconic piece of French industrial design disfigured by advertisements for a British bank. I can imagine some Frenchmen not taking kindly to that.

A Basel to Brussels train arrives headed by a French “Sybic” multi-voltage locomotive

Only three coaches of the train carried on to Brussels behind a Belgian loco. Judging by the number of railwaymen photographing this, I’m guessing it’s a rare instance of a freight loco not often seen on passenger work. It’s SNCB no 2006.

Deutche Bahn 181.218 heads the train Norddeich Mole.

Finally, my own train arrives, SNCB’s no 2018 heading the southbound EC “Vauban” Brussels to Interlaken, made up of Swiss EC coaches. The French “Sybic” from the earlier photo took the train forward after reversal.

There are larger versions of these pictures on my Fotopic site

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Photos, Railways. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.