Posted May 29, 200718 yr I'm back from a 16-day vacation in Europe, though most of it was in the UK. I took photos and video throughout, and captured many subjects. But those who know me know of my interest in rail, transit and cities. Anyway, I'll start with a photo blitz of rail and transit in four European countries. They aren't presented regionally, but alphabetically according to subject. So here comes Europe rail and transit, from A to L ..... (See M to Z at: http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=13123.0) Altrincham (end of one of the lines in the Manchester UK Metrolink tram system)... Brussels Midi Station (one of four large stations in the central city). I counted 40 station tracks and half as many platforms at Midi. It's freakin' huge! Cologne, Germany (I could have put it under "K" for Koln), but I'm an illiterate American. There is a very large retail complex below the station trackage. The track/platform capacity seems inadequate for the sheer volume of rail traffic through Koln, er Cologne... Eurostar interior... Frankfurt's Hauptbahnhof (Hbf, or main station). It's a stub-end station with lots of through trains. Think about what that means for capacity issues. It also makes for a very busy place!! When I first arrived at Gatwick outside London from my Cleveland flight, I was greeted by this sign. Hey RTA, it pays to ditch subtly for an in-your-face message.... Great North Eastern Railway, interior of their Scotland - London high-speed trains. They're 20+ years old, but they ride smoothly. I rode this one between York and London.... Some views of Germany's InterCity Express (ICE) train. It was the nicest train I rode in Europe, IMHO. Too bad some of DB's crews needed courses in customer service.... I pulled this photo off my video. It's of a large new station under construction at Liège, Belgium... Transit views included this double-decker bus crossing the Thames in London, as I went under on a cruise boat. Gotta love the Brits! London Underground's Covent Garden tube station... London Underground's Holborn tube station... London King's Cross Station, including a line up of GNER trains... Not to mention the King's Cross platform from Harry Potter fame, including a baggage cart halfway into the wall... London Paddington Station hotel and trains behind it... London Paddington Underground station (or at least one of three for the Underground at Paddington). I used this one most frequently... London ThamesLink train, crossing its namesake... London Victoria Station, built by the Southern Railway... London Waterloo Station and the Eurostar. In November, Eurostar will be relocated to St. Pancras with the opening of the last leg of the 300 km/h route into London... That's the first batch. See http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=13123.0 for the photos in subjects beginning with M-to-Z. Cheers! "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
May 29, 200718 yr you're back! nice job. takes me right back to jolly olde london. nice to see the smaller town england stuff too that i never got to check out. and some paris too. oh lo lo. so did you go via the chunnel? i'd like to see your shots of that too when you have the time.
May 29, 200718 yr What a fantastic thread!!! I love the design of European train stations...very cool.
May 30, 200718 yr Wow! Great thread! As an American in a city of 200K population with no rail service, about an hour away from a third-world-class open platform with with a plexiglas bus shelter and no restroom, for a daily train that may or may not run within three hours of schedule, I'm terribly envious of Europeans. Where do Americans get their attitude of superiority? I know, from ignorant provincialism. :roll:
May 30, 200718 yr Geez KJP....couldn't you have stuffed a few of those trains in your carry-on and sneak them back here?! Nice pix my friend. You should think about putting them together into a traveling slide show to demonstrate how far behind the curve we are here in the USA.
May 31, 200718 yr awesome coverage! the trains in europe were so amazing, when i got back to the US i was in a mild public transit shock since i took all public transit back to my house in Cleveland from New Jersey...
May 31, 200718 yr By the way, it was amazing how many Americans we ran into while on the trains in Europe. On every train except one, Americans either sat next to us, behind us or in front of us. And in this photo... ...every person visible is from America. So one might surmise that Americans do ride trains. They just don't do it much in their own country. Why? BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE THEM! "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
June 1, 200718 yr I'm familiar with the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof as we used to go through it on the the way to Frankfurt from where my granparents lived in Friedberg, and also to connect to trains to Nuremberg and Koblenz (during my visits we were always on public transit or walking as my grandparents didnt own a car). When it was built it was the largest station in Germany (but soon surpassed by the one in Leipzig). The interesting thing about this station is there is or used to be sort of a duplicate station, with a similar stub-end arrangment, to the north a bit, but it is just for freight. The area between these two stations was called the Gallusviertel, but better known as Kamerun, or Cameroon in English, after one of Germanys colonies, as it was a real "jungle"...a rough, working class area. The stub end arrangement dates from earlier stations for individual rail lines that ran from Frankfurt to other citys (like up to Kassel and down to Mannheim), as Frankfurt was sort of an end-of-the-line town for these early German railroads (sort of like Cincinnati had stub-end stations prior to Union Terminal). When the Hbf was built these lines wher cut back west from their original stations (which were right at the old city wall) and consolidated into one terminal, but the stub end arrangement was kept. I really like the pix of the Colonge station and the Eurostar...this reminds me more of air travel than train travel, like an airport or interior of an aircraft (though apparently roomier). This is very nice, thanks a bunch KJP!
June 1, 200718 yr I traveled with my mother and sister, and it was the first time my mother had been to Frankfurt since late-1945! Her father was an Army officer and assigned to Marshall Plan reconstruction efforts after the war. One of her most vivid memories of Frankfurt was seeing the bombed out train station. Its station platforms took a hit from a bomb that blew all of the train shed's glass outward. One thing I noticed while traveling by rail in Europe. It is pretty hectic, what with all the crowds and such. We often tout rail travel in the U.S. as less stressful as flying. It was the opposite in Europe. We did most our traveling and train-transferring on Friday -- the day before the holiday weekend. One of the train employees told me that the huge crowds weren't normal, adding "This is crazy!" Here's what I experienced at most stations: Train arrives to passenger-jammed platform. People getting off train try to disembark through the crowds. Those getting on the train pour in -- quickly. Train crews urge everyone to get on board fast. While the train's aisles are packed with passengers and their luggage, the train's doors are closed and scoots out of the station. We all try to squeeze past each other to get to our seats or to seek out a place to stash our luggage (there's no checked baggage). We discover passengers having unreserved tickets occupying our reserved seats. They move to other seats through the crowded aisles. And have to move again somewhere down the line at another station. Very hectic! It shows even an ideal rail system could use improvement. "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
June 2, 200718 yr Do you think we as Americans will every get it? Or will we just continue to build roads, destroy our environment and construct sprawling suburban neighborhoods that are completely isolated. I hope we get in time to leave something worth while to our ourselves and our children.
June 3, 200718 yr ...every person visible is from America. So one might surmise that Americans do ride trains. They just don't do it much in their own country. Why? BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE THEM! Now this kind of logic is simply unacceptable! People LOVE their cars...why would they abandon their personal vehicles for lousy mass transit?!?!? You must be a communist or something. :wink:
June 3, 200718 yr Excellent pictures. Heh, you try running into the wall at 9-3/4? Just look at the life in those stations. Its a shame that the majority of Americans miss this experience. The ability to socialize or be around different people. I think deep down, almost all Americans would like to see mass transit that they can have easy access to. The thing is, we have very high expectations... that it be affordable, effiicient, clean, and fast. If an American city has trains, they are usually lacking in some ways in those categories, and thus don't have high ridership. Yet in Europe, Americans embrace mass transit because it excels in those catgories.
June 3, 200718 yr Unfortunately, they're not in digital format so I can't post them at YouTube or anything. I think I have the physical capability to transfer them to digital via my computer, but I'm not that adept at computing. "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
June 4, 200718 yr I think because they didn't want to be photographed. Or they think that taking their picture will take their spirit away... "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
June 17, 200717 yr Note that I broke up this thread in two due to slow loading for forum visitors having slower Internet capabilities. "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
May 15, 200916 yr bump "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
May 18, 200916 yr Because the weekend we were in Frankfurt, the first leg of the LGV East line from Paris to near the German opened. The line will eventually extend to Frankfurt, but the high-speed trains still reached Frankfurt over conventional (80-100 mph) lines -- a huge advantage over maglev. The LGV East line was the line on which the TGV eclipsed 350 mph about a month before our trip.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ir_n3J5ABA "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
May 18, 200916 yr What's neat about that video is how it illustrates just how quickly the TGV trains reach high speed from a station stop. I remember being startled by how quickly the TGV reached its maximum 200mph after leaving the Charles De Gaulle Airport station, it was probably just 2-3 minutes as shown in this video. You have to wonder if the snaking of the overhead catenary bothers the drivers. It gives me eyestrain just watching this video.
May 18, 200916 yr After that video came out, Northern Indiana Passenger Rail Association hosted a public presentation on high-speed rail at Cinema Center-Indiana Tech, where a presenter from Alstom showed the full-resolution version on a full-sized theater screen in an auditorium with professional projection equipment. Talk about mind-blowing! I think a couple hundred people saw it, and after it ended some just sat there looking stunned.
May 18, 200916 yr I love that video. I wish I could show it to every naysayer who thinks "choo-choo" trains are obsolete technology.
May 18, 200916 yr Paris & Lyon are 240 miles apart, almost the exact distance separating Cincinnati & Cleveland, and several hundred people commute every day via the TGV since it's so fast and so reliable. What's interesting to think about with regards to the logistics of a TGV-type train between Cincinnati > Indianapolis > Chicago is just how much stopping in Indianapolis slows down the run. It makes sense therefore for the big in-city investment to be in Indianapolis, since it benefits the riders of both cities. Same thing with the Cincinnati > Columbus > Cleveland line, again it's Columbus that should get the most investment in new ROW, viaducts, tunneling, etc. in order to make the Columbus stop as short as possible, although the rail routings through Columbus are already pretty good. Also, with only 25 miles of open countryside between Cincinnati and Dayton, high speed rail will never make any sense. As was illustrated by the above video, they'd have to step on the brakes as soon as it reached top speed.
May 19, 200916 yr You have to wonder if the snaking of the overhead catenary bothers the drivers. Only when they're awake. "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
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