Kostya's Boring Codec World

First of all, unlike Rheinland Palatine railways I’ve not travelled on all local railways here because of certain geographic peculiarities it takes less time to get to the farthest corners of Rheinland-Pfalz from here than to places around Bodensee. And I can’t visit all historic railways either because one of them is located in the middle of nowhere with the only connection being a bus that comes there maybe twice a day.

Nevertheless, I’ve seen most of them and here I’d like to describe my impressions about them.
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… gibt’s gar viele Haltstatione,
Kowelenz, Bingen, Bad Kreuznach, Lautre und Waldfischbach.

Ehm, sorry, wrong federal land for that song.

I think I can call my hobby project of travelling on all rail lines in Rheinland-Pfalz that are still in service complete.
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Since today is the state holiday (some time ago two Germanies united into one—which looks more and more like DDR for some reason) why not look at Zoidberg of German lands—Saarland? Well, you might have many reasons (first, it being Saarland) but today I’ve completed my voyage on all of their accessible railways and hence this post.

First, a bit of history. As you all remember, after World War II Germany was split into four occupation zones and while I haven’t heard anything in particular about British occupation zone, the rest of occupation forces were behaving not nice at all: USA installed their military bases everywhere (and most of them are still there—at least it meant less military expenses for West Germany back in the day), USSR tried to convert its piece of Germany into a copy of itself (partly successfully, hopefully it will recover) and France was not satisfied with mere occupation and also tried to seize the part of Germany as its own but it bit more than it could chew and so back in 1957 Saarland was reunited with the rest of Germany (and that day is the state holiday too but I doubt many think of 1st of January as of Saarland reunification day).

Saarland still honours France

Second, a bit of railway network overview. Essentially you can think about it as a cross: there’s a main East-West line going from Mannheim to Trier (or Alt-Chemnitz) via Homburg and Saarbrücken, there’s a North-South line going from Bad Kreuznach to Saarbrücken, there’s a line going South from Saarbrücken to France (and another one served by tram but more about it later), there is a branch Dillingen—Niedaltdorf, there’s a line from Rohrbach to Pirmasens, there’s line Trier—Perl—Metz that goes partly through Saarland and there are several parallel lines connecting Homburg and Saarbrücken. Let’s count: Homburg—Rohrbach—Saarbrücken (that’s what trains from Mannheim to Saarbrücken use), Homburg—Neunkirchen—Saarbrücken (part of it is Nahetalbahn to Bad Kreuznach), Homburg—Neunkirchen—Merchweiler—Saarbrücken (serviced by regional trains Homburg—Illingen and Saarbrücken—Lebach) and finally there’s Homburg—Neunkirchen—Lebach—Saarbrücken via tram line that goes all the way from Lebach to Saarbrücken to Saargemünd (or Sarreguemines as some people write it).

Yes, there’s a tram line in Saarland that essentially crosses half of it. And it’s impossible to confuse it since there’s only one tram line and one tram route in Saarland.

Also I’ve found mentions of three museum lines but looks like only one is functioning: Ottweiler—Schwarzerden line (or Ostertalbahn for short). And I’ve tried it as well. Unlike many other museum lines, this one uses diesel locomotives from the 1960s (but hopefully they’ll manage to rebuild the steam locomotive from the parts they have one day). It was what can be experienced in Ukrainian regional trains—going at about 30km/h while sitting on wooden benches and enjoying looking at the nature outside. At least they boast that they work in any weather (while other museum lines close in Autumn they keep running trains in winter too).

There are many weird things there I’d like to talk about but I’ll leave them to the time when I finish travelling on all railways of Rheinland-Pfalz (should be done next year unless they decide not to open Zellertalbahn again) but here are some of them for now.

First, the train service Saarbrücken—Lebach-Jabach. Fischbachtalbahn (Saarbrücken—Wemmetsweiler) and Primstalbahn from Wemmetsweiler to Illingen are electrified (in Illingen only track 41 is electrified, track 51 is not). Then only a bit of track at Lebach is electrified but about fourteen kilometres in-between are not. We had similar situation here with Bruhrainbahn (between Graben-Neudorf and Germersheim) being not electrified so train Karlsruhe—Mainz ran mostly on electrified rails but still had to be a diesel one. At least this was fixed in 2011 by electrifying the missing piece.

Second, it’s the only tram line in Germany I know that has exit directions repeated in French too.

And third, to make Saarland feel even more like Switzerland, they have the same cryptic booking system: when I bought a ticket from Saargemünd to Lebach it offered me to choose one of three or four possible alternatives—just like buying a rail ticket in Switzerland! Come to think of it, Swiss rail system is exactly like German regional system:

• Choosing route is the same;
• German general rail tickets have a whole day of validity (or more for longer distances). German regional tickets are valid for just a couple of hours after purchase—and same in Switzerland (unless it’s some snowy route that might be closed for days);
• When I bought a ticket from Schaffhausen to Zürich (two different kantons) the ticket also listed zones—like some German regional tickets do;
• Like with German regional trains, the type does not really matter. It may be S-Bahn, RegioBahn, RegioExpress or InterRegioExpress—the ticket is valid regardless. Same in Switzerland: the same ticket valid for any kind of train and trains change classes during the travel (i.e. train Basel—Chur was labelled as InterCity up to Zürich and InterRegio after that, the difference is only how many intermediate stops it makes);
• And finally, the famous Swiss train punctuality. Well, it’s a known effect that regional trains have much better punctuality than long-distance ones (and all trains in Switzerland are essentially slow regional trains).

So despite all local jokes about Saarland being very backward place (some even call it “rear end of Germany”) it’s quite European place in some aspects. And remember that it has a real Schengen border (i.e. it borders with Luxembourg where town of Schengen known for some treaty is located).

I wanted to write this post for several months since in July I finally had a chance to travel on some of the important Swedish railways.

Well, as anybody knows, I love Sweden and railways. And Swedish railways too. And obviously I’d like to ride them all and recently I’ve moved much closer to that goal.

There are this important railways in Sweden (sorry if I forgot some but this list should cover the most important ones):

• Ostkustbanan (Stockholm—Uppsala—Gävle—Sundsvall)
• Ådalsbanan+Botniabanan (Sundsvall—Kramfors—Umeå)
• Norra stambanan (Gävle—Ånge)
• Stambanan genom övre Norrland (Ånge—Bräcke—Vännäs—Boden)
• Malmbanan (Luleå—Boden—Kiruna—Narvik)
• Mittbanan (Sundsvall—Ånge—Östersund—Storlien—Hell—Trondheim)
• Inlandsbanan (Gällivare—Östersund—Orsa—Mora)
• Dalabanan+Siljansbanan (Uppsala—Borlänge, Borlänge—Mora)
• Bergslagsbanan (Gävle—Borlänge—Frövi)
• Västra stambanan (Stockholm—Göteborg)
• Södra stambanan (Stockholm—Malmö)
• Mälarbanan (Stockholm—Västerås—Örebro)
• Svealandsbanan (Stockholm—Eskilstuna—Arboga)
• Värmlandsbanan (Laxå—Charlottenberg, further to Oslo)
• Kust till kust-banan (Göteborg—Alvesta—Kalmar)
• Västkustbanan (Lund—Göteborg)
• Jönköpingsbanan (Nässjö—Falköping)

And I want to talk about those railways and my experience there.
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So I had a chance to visit Belgium and Netherlands and what I’ve seen there makes me write this post.

Luxembourg

I visited it some years ago and it looked quite decent to me, nothing particularly strange.

Belgium

Previously I only went to Brussels for FOSDEM but this time I travelled around a bit and saw places outside the capital too.

So, they have nice touches like typeface used for station names, various kinds of trains (though I haven’t seen their outdated train that used to go between Liege and Aachen) and very interesting rail station in Antwerpen.

The only strange thing is that they hang out timetables for workdays and weekdays separately (at least in Bruxelles Nord).

The only stupid thing I saw is ticket machines having a special button for international trains and when you press it it tells you that you can’t buy an international train ticket there. And Belgium is such a small country that it’s hard to travel in any direction for an hour and not cross some border (or get into the sea). One would expect that buying tickets to neighbouring lands would be easier, especially for such close countries like Belgium and Netherlands.

Netherlands

Now this country looks like everything there was designed by idiots.

First, trains. By themselves they are not that bad but they have the best counterintuitive designed door open buttons. First, they are labelled the same: half-opened (or half-closed) doors with small arrows showing opening or closing. So if you have not a very good sight (like me) you’ll be confused. But buttons are colour-coded! Yes, and while on German trains it’s intuitive green—open, red—close (or just a single button for open/close), Dutch trains have yellow button for opening doors and green (or blue for random Japanese) button for closing. Honestly, it should be intuitive to have green button to open doors so you can go. And I’d like to hear a reason behind this beside “well, cannabis is legal in Netherlands”.

Next, timetables. Those are confusing as well. At least in Rotterdam timetables are hanged separately for each fork (well, it should be a line but most of them are drawn as forks which probably means the train parts separate at some point and head in two different directions)—maybe it’s this convoluted system made them invent InterCity Direct too (don’t ask me how that’s different from normal InterCity). And the separate timetable for international trains. Confusing.

And since that was not enough stupidity, they decided to install turnstiles in Rotterdam Centraal so in order to enter or leave the station you need to scan your ticket (yes, it’s like what you have in underground systems but in this case for rail station). And it might be the only station there with such a feature, I saw nothing like that in Amsterdam C when I visited couple of years ago or in The Hague two days ago.

Speaking of The Hague, they have the stupid station name—Den Haag HS where last two letters stay for Hollands Spoor or Dutch Rail. I know only two cases where such naming makes sense:

• you have a station in the same town belonging to different railway operators e.g. in Basel you have the main station operated by CFF and so it’s called Basel SBB, French railways have their own section there called Elsässerbahnhof or Bâle SNCF and there’s a station used to belong to Baden Railways that is still called Basel Badischer Bahnhof;
• you had a competing rail operator and the name stuck (a variation of the above really)—e.g. stations on track Bullay (DB)—Traben-Trarbach(DB) are called so because there was another rail line (on the other side of Mosel) with the same stations and when it was closed nobody wanted to rename stations just because;
• you’re SNCF and you want to mark your stations because they’re yours and no foreign train should set wheel there!

And as far as I know none of this applies to The Hague. I suspect it happened because they have built a new station later (more than a century later) that they designated as central one and could not make a good name for the old station. It’s like in Germany they’d rename station Hamburg-Altona to Hamburg Hbf and Hamburg Hbf to Hamburg DB. In other words, pointless and stupid.

Overall, it was an interesting experience travelling Belgium and Netherlands but I did not expect that much stupidity from the latter. Anyway, the next post should be about Rust.

Since I don’t have enough time to visit proper country I went to bad substitute of Sweden that’s much more accessible—Switzerland (it should be obvious why I cannot call it poor or cheap substitute). Since it happened on Easter (April 1-2), the environment was resembling Sweden: snow, mountains, deer and log sheds. And of course I could ride trains in new locations!

Rhaetian railways is a narrow-gauge railway system in canton Graubünden (which symbol uncannily resembles the one from Gävle), a fractal part of Switzerland occupying its south-east corner (fractal in the sense that canton shape looks almost exactly like the shape of whole Switzerland). Trains run in a picturesque scenery with dreadful names like Fhtagn (or Ftan in Swiss-Cthüelsch) or SaaS (they really have a station with such name!), going up to the mountains (in 1-2 km above sea level range) and I spent couple of days travelling around.

But while the scenery is okay, the railways are some unholy mix of Berlin S-Bahn, Czech and German railways:

• There are German ICEs running there all the way to Chur (so I could travel home without any transfers);
• The tracks are curvy and trains are as slow as in Czechia (i.e. no matter where you go it will take you at least an hour or two to get there);
• Prices are like in Czechia too except they use Swiss Francs instead of Czech Koruna—but numbers are about the same (so it seems I can ride with ICE here cheaper, faster and on much longer distance than with RhB);
• Another thing like in Czechia: buying a ticket with a card involves 1,5€ surcharge. No such thing in Sweden;
• Narrow-gauge trains are a weird mix themselves: they can put locomotive in the front of the train, in the end (maybe), in the middle (very common) or just couple a typical EMU with a number of conventional rail carriages (I’m not sure I’ve seen that anywhere else);
• Weird station names: I can understand when you name a station after two places at once like Reichenau-Tamins (that’s common in Germany too) or even if you name it after the same place twice like Disentis/Mustér (it’s Confoederatio Helvetica, natives can’t agree on a single name for anything) but Tavanasa-Breil/Brigels is definitely too much (it’s a station between those two mentioned earlier BTW);
• It’s afraid of snow: after even insignificant amount of snow they stop going on some routes: on my stay there the trains on Pontresina-Tirano and Disentis/Mustér­-Andermatt routes were cancelled for indefinite amount of days. In Germany trains are more punctual—if they are late they’re late for dozens of minutes, not days. And if something bad happens and trains can run some route for days then you can see information everywhere including how to get around and such. No such thing in Switzerland;
• And another thing that’s taken from German S-Bahn is timetables and tickets. This requires a separate rant.

Overall, FFS or RhB is not very friendly to a traveller: you should have a definite idea where are you going to, when (at which time and such) and how (i.e. where to transfer) if you want to buy a ticket. For example, I was at the station Chur-West and wanted to go to Scuol-Tarasp. The ticket vending machine offered me to choose from three options: via Samedan, via Chur-Samedan (i.e. go first to Chur main station and from there to Samedan and then to Scuol) or via Vereina. The last option is actually a tunnel and not a station name!

In Germany when you travel with long distance trains you actually choose one of the provided connection possibilities (e.g. InterCity from A to B, RegioBahn from B to C and ICE from C to D or InterCity from A to E and then from E to D) or you can use the provided functionality for route planning even if you don’t buy a ticket. SBB ticket machines simply allow you to buy ticket from A to B maybe with cryptic route midpoint and that’s all! That’s exactly how German ticket vending machines for regional transport work. And there’s yet another point of annoyance: Swiss rail timetables fail to include arrival time for the final destination so if you care about it (like I sometimes do) you have to find it out via other means. It’s plain stupid.

Oh, and the snow-related problem: when you buy a ticket you can’t be sure the train will go there because the only cryptic warning I got is when ticket machine said my ticket will be valid on April 1st-April 9th period (and much later in the train too). In Germany it actually shows warnings when there’s some problem with a train or it’s cancelled entirely (since you can use it later). I actually had a situation when one segment of my travel was served by a train that broke down and I had to take another train later instead. So it feels like you should rather use smartphone and buy ticket online where you can see the actual route and warnings (and probably use bahn.de instead of cff.ch too where possible).

Overall, travelling with Rhaetian railways was both a pleasant and exciting experience in some aspects (i.e. when I was inside the train) and confusing and frustrating experience in others (i.e. when I actually tried to buy a ticket). They also boast how some parts of the system are the third railway in UNESCO World Heritage Railways (the second after India, I guess) and how picturesque some parts are (they are almost as interesting as Sauschwänzlebahn indeed) but as I’ve seen it all there’s no reason to return there (and the reliable source says there are better places in Switzerland to wait over heat waves too).

I’ve finally travelled enough Czech railways (mostly in the South-western part of the country) to form some impressions about them.

First, they have somewhat funny train terminology there: R means “rychlik” or express train while R-egional trains are marked as Os or “osobni” but in reality they all move with speed around 50 km/h.

Second, the rolling stock.
Typical locomotive
The trains are usually two-four carriages dragged by locomotive, most often like on the picture above. It brings nostalgia to me because it looks like a Škoda train from 1960s that was one of the best locomotives in the USSR, and it was also nicknamed Cheburashka because it both looked a bit like a titular hero of that anime (formerly Soviet cartoon) and featured there as well. You can also see rail buses, double-decker regional trains (the same as InterCity trains in Ukraine) and some other types but they are very rare.

Speaking of locomotives, I had a brief visit to Austria and saw their main locomotive ÖBB 1044. And what do you know, it looks like a replica of Rc-locomotive from Sweden. And then you read that Austrian Railways actually bought ten Rc2 from Sweden and designated them as ÖBB 1043 locomotives. Since Rc2 was the best locomotive in Austria it’s no wonder they’ve designed the next model after it.

Third, tickets. Outside Prague you can buy tickets usually just at ticket office at the station or maybe at conductors (but I’ve never tried that), ticket offices accept Euros and sometimes you can pay with a card too (mind the signs there). Another funny thing is that tickets usually contain the stations you should pass on your route and they’re a lot like German tickets for regional trains—you just buy a ticket for a route, which train you choose is up to you. Even better that in most cases you can buy tickets outside country, like I’ve bought ticket Praha-Tábor in Dresden.

Fourth, infrastructure in general. And that’s where it sucks.
A station somewhere between Jihlava and České Budějovice

Station houses look like they were built either in XIXth century under Austrian rule or in 1970s under Soviet rule (those look like featureless boxes essentially) and many of them are not very well maintained unfortunately. Another thing is platforms. You can see typical Czech platform on the first picture. They are often about just twice as high as rails and not particularly wide too, you can meet high platforms only on big stations and very random places (IIRC I’ve seen one at Velesín Město and there’s just a single track there).

And now for the tracks themselves. Rail connectivity is very good there so you can get from one place to another without going through Prague, the downside is that it usually takes two hours to get from one node to another as I’ve mentioned above all trains travel with the speed around 50 km/h. I’ve travelled on routes Dresden-Praha, Linz-Prag, Praha-Schwandorf, Tábor-Jihlava and Jihlava-Plzeň and looks like only routes from Prague to important places like České Budějovice, Plzeň and such are double-track (and to Dresden for some reason), the rest are single-track and often are curvy as they were drawn with a tail of stubborn mule as we say here. Also track Tábor-Horní Cerekev is quite bumpy and reminds more of a typical Ukrainian road than railway.

In general, Czech railways leave an impression of railways in rural area and thus they have their inimitable charm. Throw in a nostalgic feeling from the locomotives and you can say I liked it despite all downsides.

So what I’ve discovered today.

There’s a Schwarzwaldbahn going through Schwarzwald from Offenburg to Konstanz and there’s a station there — Villingen. That station bears a plaque that it had 10000th kilometre of electrification of DB network done in 1975 (DDR railways on the other hoof lost most of its electrification after the war because it was more important to electrify Soviet railways but that’s another story).

And there’s a branch connecting Villingen (Baden) with Rottweil (Württemberg) — unelectrified. And that branch has its own subbranch to Trossingen Stadt. That subbranch is also served by a diesel railbus. But unlike the branch it connects to it’s electrified! And that electrification is used only by museum vehicles from 1930s-1960s that are electric only (or in one case it’s a carriage with an electric locomotive).

On most such lines in Germany one usually has trains hauled by a steam locomotive or a diesel rail buses and the main traffic is electrified but in this case it’s the other way round. I have only one possible explanation — Württemberg.

P.S. Still it’s hard to find stupider situation with electrification than in Denmark. The only countries it has connections to had chosen 15 kV 16? Hz system. Denmark settled on 25 kV 50 Hz. But looking at their other railway-related decision (i.e. IC4) it seems logical.

P.P.S. For Ukraine the situation is sadder — once I was in Uzhgorod-Kharkiv train and it had to change locomotive twice because there are two electrification systems there (which make three areas). They claim it was done to better account for relief, i.e. different electrification for the flatter and mountainy regions. Hopefully there will be more two-system trains in the future (and there will be the future too).

I’ve not written anything about one of the crucial topics of this blog since ages, so here’s the long-awaited update.

Today I’d like to talk about probably the most interesting railway in Germany — Wutachtalbahn or Kursbuchstrecke 743 (Waldshut-Immendingen). It was build as a route to the South border of Germany that does not go on Swiss territory (the line along the Rhine it connects to goes through Basel and canton Schaffhausen).

Now, what makes it so interesting?

Despite being rather unimportant line nowadays and being about only 60km long (and there are no branches either!), it is operated by three different rail companies:

1. northern part (Immendingen — Blumberg-Zollhaus) is operated by SWEG
2. central part (Blumberg-Zollhaus — Weizen) is operated by WTB
3. southern part (Weizen — Lauchringen — Waldshut) is operated by DB

(Image shamelessly stolen from Wickedpedia)

So you have three different companies running trains on approximately 20km tracks. Is it the same rolling stock? Of course not!

SWEG runs class 650 (aka Stadler RS1) diesel unit, Deutsche Bahn employs class 641 diesel unit and WTB runs a steam locomotive (Württembergische T.14 or class 52.80 or something similar) with bunch of outdated carriages from various places (like Switzerland).

And for unknown reason it’s nicknamed “Pig’s Tail Railway” (see the map above, I have no clue why) and the name somehow appeals to me.

I’ve visited it in three parts: one year I saw the middle part, next year I saw the north parth and later I saw the last part too. Curiously, while DB runs the most modern train the route itself seems the most outdated: the rails are uneven so you can get a bit seasick, the signal system is implemented by driver’s assistant with a red flag who stands on the crossing while the train passes it and it does not stand on the Weizen station for long because it has to give room to the WTB train (in result it comes to the station, waits a bit and cowardly retreats back to the track and waits there till the WTB train is gone).

In general I’d recommend visiting it if you happen to be there. If you want to see something better — go to Sweden and try Uppsala-Lenna railway, it’s the best (now I want to visit it again — oh wait, I wanted that before too).