Recent content by Golghar

Last time I was on a train from Düsseldorf to Arnhem the conductor went through the train handing out pieces of paper with the QR-code for exiting at Arnhem printed on them.

The line upto Zahedan on the Iranian side of the Iran-Pakistan border wasn't completed yet. He took the road from Mashad through Afghanistan to Landi Kotal, the terminus on the Pakistan side of the Khyber Pass. Paul Theroux's book contains some fascinating snapshots of 1973, the year in which he...

1780035932 Click on the "Information for holders of the Deutschland-Ticket" and follow the instructions. Of course this is the desk-top version. And Indicate "Bruxelles Midi as destination, of course.

Nowadays "EC" stands for "Electronic Cash", i.e. debit cards.

The Germanisches Nationalmuseum at Nürnberg might also be worth a visit.

Sealdah used to be the terminus of the Eastern Bengal Railway that lost most of its network to East Pakistan in 1947. In 1965 all railway traffic between India and Pakistan was suspended leaving Sealdah with mostly local and suburban traffic. The new "Kolkata" station was only opened in 2006. It...

Most of the Turkey-Syria border runs along the Baghdad Railway. This border was created after WW1.

That was mainly due to a cold-war anomaly that left the station itself under the jurisdiction of the GDR railway police while the surrounding area was controlled by West Berlin police who couldn't follow a a suspect into the station premises without setting off an international crisis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Saarow_station As for architecture, this art nouveau gem not far from Berlin is my favourite. The platform under the colonnade is a nice touch for a spa town.

Switzerland has been part of the Schengen area for some time but it remains outside the EU so some customs rules still apply. This includes the amount of undeclared currency one can carry across the border. This was what kicked off the Gurlitt affair some years ago.

The GDR used to permit persons arriving at Berlin-Schönefeld airport, which was situated in the GDR proper outside the city limits of Berlin, to transit to West Berlin via the Friedrichstrasse station. In the 1980s as anxieties about unauthorised entry into West Berlin grew ID checks were...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Hauptbahnhof And between 1960 and 1999 a suburban station quite some distance from the city centre went under the name "Potsdam Hauptbahnhof". In 1999 it reverted to "Potsdam Pirschheide" and is served hourly by a local train.

https://www.esac.cz/en/schiele-and-krumlov/ Český Krumlov is associated with the Austrian expressionist painter Egon Schiele and was one of his favourite subjects.

"Videň" is Czech for Vienna; "Bécs" is Magyar (Hungarian).

In "The Old Patagonian Express" Paul Theroux describes travelling to Laredo, Texas on AMTRAK, then crossing the border on foot to Nuevo Laredo in Mexico where he catches a train to Mexico City.