The Great Circular European Railway Challenge

[Mark_Lester]

well, it will be half nine, there is a bar called express cafe from what I can gather.

in the process of looking at photos of hlavna stanica i came across these
http://www.steamstoryagency.eu/en/2008Bratislava/
one of those blue ones might work in gimp (free photoshop) for the tee.

 

[Donbacsi]

If you shave hours off Budapest for any more time in Bratislava, you will be performing a communal circular butt kicking once you get to Budapest...seriously!

 

[Mark_Lester]

I was just testing to see if you were still here Don.
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I have failed to get a choo choo that works any better than that royal blue or whatever it is.

this would need neatening up, the advantage of the steam engine pic is it doesnt matter if the place names are all wobbly, whereas with this they'd have to be grid tight.
Anyway, oh high preist of steam, are you anymore likely to wear this ?, if not we'll stick with the yankee doodle steam engine.

 

[Glenmutchkin]

Dunno where Mick is but I would deffo vote for a loco rather than some dodgy set of EC stars. Is there some significance to 12 stars that I have missed?

 

[Mark_Lester]

Dunno where Mick is but I would deffo vote for a loco rather than some dodgy set of EC stars. Is there some significance to 12 stars that I have missed?

OK, yank engine stays
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http://www.change.org/petitions/cro...&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=share_petition

not a good omen.
we have 3 cross border services, but only one of them originate in croatia.
there's
belgrade->sarajevo
sarajevo->ploce
and
zagreb->ljubljana (which runs up to villach)

It seems we are in luck, the ploce train and I presume our villach train are OK. (use google translate in chrome)
http://www.hznet.hr/medunarodni-prijevoz
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the belgrade-sarajevo is run by serb railways. I'll give my gal a call in belgrade, it's a day train but it's never turned up on bahn.de anyway.

 

[KS]

Anyway, oh high preist of steam, are you anymore likely to wear this ?, if not we'll stick with the yankee doodle steam engine.

I think the logo with the steam engine was better! The vintage look went well with "(dis)orient" express headline.
.

 

[Mark_Lester]

just did some surfing on "belgrade sarajevo train"
this one isn't very informative really
http://www.groundedtravel.com/routes/rail/europe/belgrade-sarajevo-train

this one claims it's only got one carriage, but also, that it uses a croatian engine to do the croatian bit, which I guess is obvious to those of you who understand how railways work, but concerning from the croatian policy of "we dont do (much) international trains these days".
http://www.regent-holidays.co.uk/bl...ispensable-sarajevo-and-belgrade-travel-tips/

from looking at serbian railway news, it's clear that the ruskis are bankrolling their old ally's railway, so hopefully the agreement for a croaitan engine to take it from the bosnian to the serbian border still stands.

I just mailed our gal Ognjenka in Belgrade to see what she knows.
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I think the logo with the steam engine was better! The vintage look went well with "(dis)orient" express headline.
.

yes, there was an outcry from several quarters, and I'm not good enough at this to get anything else to look as good as the one we have.
I am just neatening it up prior to taking it to Sumo Sam's here in Reading to see if it's going to work. The main issue is probably going to be the font I've used as the top two bars of the E are very close.
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not sure if this is good or bad, but at least we'll know in 2 months.

Dear Mark,

We will safely know everything in connect with time-table 8 th of Decembre 2012.

The train 451 (Sarajevo-Beograd) is not sure 100% yet, but negotiations are underway.

Best regards,

Ognjenka

 

[Glenmutchkin]

We will have to buy Ognjenka a bunch of flowers or something.

 

[Mark_Lester]

We will have to buy Ognjenka a bunch of flowers or something.

Sarajevo-Ploce is going to be a summer only service according to latest reports, which is obviously good enough for us. I guess there's a good chance of Belgrade-Sarajevo running at least in the summer too.
There's no mention of the Budapest-Sarajevo service, which was the only other train out of Croatia up the Bosna valley to Sarajevo. I dunno if the Bosnians have something we could pick up at the border, but it doesnt look like it.
This page claims there is a night service from Zagreb to Sarajevo, but I dont think that's currently running anyway, and I would bet no money at all on it running after these cuts anyway http://www.zfbh.ba/zfbhenx/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=56&Itemid=88

She's been very useful for getting feeback on the reliability of services, and advised us to book couchettes out of Skopje even though it sometimes has full sleeper cars. If they pull this off then we'll certainly be able to get a bunch at the "Green Wreath" market in Belgrade, which we'll need to hit in order that we dont starve for 9 hours on the Sarajevo train (it does a line in warm beer from what I can gleam, but not a lot else).

 

[mickpop]

Sorry - I've been asleep! Although no Eurosceptic I prefer the steam loco logo although I don't propose wearing the T shirt for the full two weeks - only for publicity shots and posing for GQ magazine.

 

[Mark_Lester]

Yes, sorry about the engun, no one is going to notice/care I'm sure. We've dropped just about any specialist steam locations from the plan anyway. I did have several attempts with something more authentic, or at least European anyway, but unless you do this stuff for a living it's actually quite hard.
I've cleaned it up a bit more, in particular with the type face and finally got the alignment of the names to be at least spaced properly (twas the descenders on the capital S and K that were screwing things up) . I also dropped Trieste, cos we aren’t going there now!. I had to add an extra city else the O shape wouldn’t work nicely, so I've taken Zurich over Bern, Switzerland now has 3 cities, only matched by Italy, none of which are actually it's capital. We actually have no time for any frivolities in Zurich, though we do in Hamburg which I havent included, but that would have meant Ljubljana on the bottom and I wanted Arctic-Circle versus Venice on that axis.

There's a place called Sumo Sam's round the corner from me which will do proper silk screens, (like the nicer ones Ryan did in India but that none of us "substantial" ones could fit into), which will cost £8.50 a shot for a tee.

We await news from Croatia.

 

[Mark_Lester]

No news is bad news for Belgrade-Sarajevo. We should start working out what the road based solutions are for this, we're too far down this to change any dates.
I havent given up or anything, but ultimately this does involve Croats being nice to Serbs.

I spammed a load of these travel blogs on the behest of an admirer, I've a few guest posts scheduled as a result. But I got one guy from "the colonies" asking me if I knew about a thing called "The Ultimate Train Challenge" (which of course I do, and frankly I'm not overly impressed) and had I ripped him off. So, predictably to those who know me, I gave him chapter and verse of the list of folks who have, one way or the other, disemboweled me.
Mick might have seen this thread, though I think I started a second one on IRFCA a few years later when I decided I'd built up enough brownie points with She Who Must Be Obeyed to go for the India trip
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/irfca/message/140144
I dunno if anyone knows John Lacey, but if you're in here John, I owe it all to you

 

[Glenmutchkin]

Sadly the link that you have posted is closed to people who are not irfca members.

 

[Mark_Lester]

oh, thanks. I'll have to lift the key bits of the thread as it's my proof of conceptual originality. I posted on 3rd Oct 2006 an initial 19 day plan that included Shimla, DHR and Ooty. John politely replied with this, but I never heard from him again.

Mark,

These may seem to be two rude questions, but that is not their intent.

1) How much experience have you had of India/Indian Railways ( you
mention having travelled Leh-Shimla)?
2) How old are you?

The reason I ask both questions is that this is a very demanding
itinerary. You have hardly any time off the trains. Rather than the 19
days you have allowed, aim for 40 or more!

Even if you are aged 20, and resilient and vigorous this seems like a
killer itinerary to me.
...
It's a very courageous idea you have Mark! I'm happy to try to help you
make it work; but, honestly, I don't think it can be done in the present
form. Simply on the basis that you might have a delay of 12 hours or
more en route apart from anything else.

the route we eventually cooked up was a few days shorter, but the timings were actually even tighter on the whole, and in fog plagued feb. dec and jan are the worst, though my stats accumulated from trainenquiry.com show that we'd have made it even if we'd picked the worst week of the year.

The conclusion that I drew from the India project was that this perception that most people hold, including a whole lot of Indians, that Indian trains are notoriously unreliable, is generally utter rubbish.
There are certain weekly trains that dont seem to care what end of the country they are in from one day to the next, but anything, and I mean anything, that runs daily or at least several times a week, is on the whole and relative to the kind of distances being covered, pretty damn well behaved.
The other point that John raises, which is that Indian trains are not physically sustainable for lilly livered westerners, is also nonsense. Get a pass from Shankar, book yourself into ACII for the whole trip, and get yourself psyched up, and you can do epic mileage.
I dont know if and when I'll get to take the European "every capital" slant on this and re-apply back to India and do every state capital in under 3 weeks, but you really dont have to be Benedict Allen to do it.
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I just searched for John, I cant believe either you or Mick don’t know him or of him, he's quite an Indian steam aficionado. Ah, he's an Aussie, Director of the NSW Rail Transport Museum in Australia for a number of years in the 1980s

 

[mickpop]

I only know the aforementioned gentleman from the IRFCA forum. He is much venerated on there, possibly because he is/was one of the few non-Indian based members and posted a lot of steam era photos on their gallery. Interest in railways as a subject in its own right ,as opposed to its function in getting from A to B, is a fairly new phenomena among Indians and there is relatively little available in terms of photographic material from the steam era, ie before the mid 1990s, apart from that taken by non-Indians.

I know he has met with several members of the IRFCA and been 'railfanning' [god -what an awfull word that is!] with them. I don't know the extent of his travels but his comments on the, then, proposed GCIRC suggest his endurance threshold must be quite low - and I thought Aussies were supposed to be 'dead 'ard'! In his defence I get the impression he is, like myself, of advancing years and his build would make you and I Mark appear quite emaciated by comparison. Perhaps getting into the top berth on a 3 tier sleeper might have been a factor in his pessimism? However, as the group farewell photo at Panvel shows, I survived the trip, aged 63 with no upset stomachs etc, and still had a smile on my face.

I don't think any implied criticism of 'stealing' the challenge concept holds water as the concept is much older than the Lisbon to Saigon trip. People have set out to do various long distance rail and overland journeys for years - I had mates that did Liverpool to Sydney by Landrover in the 1960s and London to Vladivostock/ China by rail must also have been done to death over the years.

Just had a look at the Ultimate Ralway Challenge and it is not half as hard as one might expect. The first part of the journey is on European trains so fairly comfy, then several days on the trans Siberian [boring but bearable], and then a fairly short hop to Vietnam - ChinaRail is reliable and comfy too[been there done that!]. However I think the three participants were our 'cousins' from across the sea so maybe that was a challenge for them!

 

[Mark_Lester]

oh, I suspect that he might have left us.
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re Belgrade to Sarajevo, there is a train to Podgorica, capital of Montenegro. The train actually goes through Bosnia, such is the state of the borders round there. It would then mean making it by road all along the coast up to Split, and obviously losing the Sarajevo->Ploce train. Not ideal but I'm just looking at the options.

There is also some funky looking narrow gauge on the serb/bosnian border called The Sargan Eight
http://solair.eunet.rs/~rabotic/sargan.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUzx8LR6Akg

We'd have to get the same Podgorica train and get off at Užice (Ужице). It's not going to pan out I know, we'd end up in Sarajevo late and it's stupid o'clock kick off again in the morning. but it's fun digging these things out. We just have to pray that the belgrade->sarajevo train gets re-instated.
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This sargan 8 thing actually does run. It used to go all the way to sarajevo, so it would have been a stonking way to do it.

http://www.serbianrailways.com/acti...anska_osmica/red_voznje_sarganske_osmice.html

It's about 50 miles from Visegrad on the Bosnian end to Sarajevo, and only about 15 from Užice at the serbian, indeed there's an even closer stop at Branesci that's less than 10 km from where the narrow gauge starts. It's such a shame they didnt manage to re-lay it all the way back to the main line.

The train out of belgrade wouldnt get us up there till 2pm, so it wouldn't work, but as it is alleged that most of the people on the belgrade sarajevo train are tourists anyway, if they worked this out they could replace it with a service on this with a short bus at one end, and a longer, I guess 1.5 hours max, one at the other, and still get in not much later.
I guess that's asking for a bit too much common sense.

 

[mickpop]

As resident steam nerd I should have mentioned earlier that there is 'proper' steam in the Balkans as opposed to 'heritage' lines. Several coal mines in Bosnia operate ex-German 'kriegslok' 2-10-0s and also some six coupled tank engines that resemble the US Army locos of which the Southern Region in Britain had a number. There are also some narrow gauge 0-8-2 tender engines of the type that operated widely over the old Yugoslavia including the line from Dubrovnik. Not checked yet to see if we might glimpse any in passing.

I made my first overeas visit there in the 1960s and, not knowing that it was one of the most security conscious ofthe Eastern bloc, made the mistake of photographing an ancient loco in Dubrovnik station. I was quickly pursued by several policemen but, being fitter and slimmer then, managed to outrun them!

There is a link here to information about Bosnian steam, also on the same site some stuff on Kosovo and Serbia.
http://www.internationalsteam.co.uk/europe.htm#Bosnia

 

[Mark_Lester]

how coincidental, a mate of mine sent me this the other day
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/10/hunt-last-steam-train/3582/

so is this guy flogging trips to China for no really good reason ?. I suppose they are still running coal trains about the network in China.
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none of the pics on there are later than 2005. do they still run steam on the network over there are are these poor American "rail fans" being duped ?.
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*double take*
you outran the KGB ?. wow!
the train we want to get goes through zenica, but there's a line on either side of the river at that point, one on the coal and steel works side and one on the other, and all it says for the station is "zenica" (if it said zenica tyer. then we'd know we werent in luck) so I dont know if we go through the coal yard or not, but I suspect not

 

[Golghar]

I made my first overeas visit there in the 1960s and, not knowing that it was one of the most security conscious ofthe Eastern bloc, made the mistake of photographing an ancient loco in Dubrovnik station. I was quickly pursued by several policemen but, being fitter and slimmer then, managed to outrun them!

A couple of British plane spotters weren't so lucky in 1973. Do you remember this case?

@Mark
That wasn't the KGB. They had been kicked out of Yugoslavia back in 1948. The Yugoslavs had their own outfit.

 

[Mark_Lester]

I believe they were called the UDBA, and ranked somewhere between Ceausescu’s totally brutal Securitate to the relatively moderate Czech Statni.
Despite the bolshies being kicked out in '48, the fact remains to this day, as it did throughout the 20th century to cataclysmic effect, that Serbian power in the region is totally underpinned by their vast Slavic ally to the east. Once Russia faltered, Yugoslavia disintegrated, or spontaneously combusted, by default.
Indeed, from a rail perspective, we're relying on the Ruskies to bankroll whatever the Croatians want out of the Serbians to keep this train running.

You need to cough up your credit card number to Time to read that article, how long were they banged up for ?.


On a completely unrelated issue, regarding the currently theoretical Project Konigsberg (cross every bridge and tunnel in NY city once and once only in about 3 days), I found this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subway_Challenge
leading to
http://www.rapidtransitchallenge.com/rules.htm
and hence this
http://www.boylefamily.com/rapidtransitchallenge/submissions.htm
which is obviously a tad stale, but there's lots of email addresses in there. We couldn’t find anyone in "railfan" America to even discuss it with us before. I dig the one about having to apply the freedom of information act to get a list of loos out of the new york tube company.

I'd be more interested in inventing something actually feasible, and nutritional, rather than some Guinness nonsense. But there's still a valid maths angle to working out what that might be.
Note that, in order to solve the topology, you can "cheat" by getting ferries and walking bridges, even get a yellow cab over ones that dont have buses, but you should only ever do any specific crossing once, or that would be really really cheating.

 

[mickpop]

how coincidental, a mate of mine sent me this the other day
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/10/hunt-last-steam-train/3582/

so is this guy flogging trips to China for no really good reason ?. I suppose they are still running coal trains about the network in China.
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none of the pics on there are later than 2005. do they still run steam on the network over there are are these poor American "rail fans" being duped ?.

Sadly there are no steam hauled trains on the national network, ChinaRail, but they were extensively used on industrial and 'local' railways. I think the latter are run by municipalities. Some of the systems are very extensive and among the most famous are the deep opencast coalpits such as Fushun and Jalainur which are, I think, the biggest man made holes in the world. The industrial lines mainly use SY class 2-8-2s which wwere built into the 1980s if not the 90s. I photographed some being built at Tangshan works in Hebei province in 1986. They also use JS 2-8-2s and QJ 2-10-2s [Chinese versions of Russian FD class] which were the last types used on the national system. I saw some ofthe last QJs being built at Datong in 1986.

The Chinese were planning to produce a thoroughly modern steam loco using David Wardale as a consultant. He had worked for South African Railways developing super-efficient locos before the government pulled the plug on the project, as did the Chinese eventually.

I believe there are some UK based tour operators, Far Rail for example, offering trips to China but the pockets of steam operation are getting fewer every year and making a worthwhile visit less likely.

Some Chinese industrials -

http://mickpope.zenfolio.com/p604491983

Incidentally the Bosnian tank locos are similar to those in photos 14,15 and 16 in the Chinese gallery.

 

[Golghar]

You need to cough up your credit card number to Time to read that article, how long were they banged up for ?.

Four years, apparently: www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1974/1974 - 0085.html. Read the letter to the editor in the lower right hand corner (Spotters in Sarajevo). It continues on the next page. This is the editorial it refers to (Reggie Spotters).

 

[Mark_Lester]

I mailed our Belgrade gal the other day, ostensibly to talk about this Sargan 8 and if, given the Croatian problems, if there might be an extended service (it only runs in summer anyway) that might make this an alternative route. In theory, based on the timings on the Serb railway page, if they ran an afternoon service the full length of it you could get the 9:00 train our of belgrade, catch the sagan and be at the far end for 4 and in Sarajevo for about 6.
But really I just wanted an excuse to ask how negotiations were going. I got nothing back. And there's no updates on the protest page.

blinkin' 'eck, it used to run all the way from Belgrade, see bottom of here
http://folkestonejack.wordpress.com/category/serbia/sargan/

 

[Mark_Lester]

David has just noticed that the train out of Lisbon doesn’t leave now till 21:18, which results in an arrival in Paris at 18:33.
So we should perhaps go for the last train out of Paris, the 21:13, though that only gets us into St Pancras for 22:38, just enough time perhaps to get last orders at the John Betjeman.
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actually, according to bahn as it stands, it worse than that, it claims there isn’t a connection from hendaye till half past 5, we wouldn’t make it back to blighty.
I am closing my eyes to this, it cant be true, tell me it's just a timetable update issue, please.
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I got this from raileurope

There are engineering works being planned on the Hendaye - Paris line, and so these services are currently not available for sale. As a result, this does unfortunately mean that I am unable to guarantee the timetables, and so I cannot confirm if there will be a suitable connection.

No information was provided as to what exactly these works are, or where, or how long they are due to take.
humf, looking a bit closer, next year, there is a new service TGV8436 out of Bordeaux at 15:28, leaving at the same time as the TGV8534 did from Hendaye.
This new service though is a stopping train (the 8534 just goes non stop from Bordeaux all the way to Paris, this new one has 5 stops, and so doesnt get in till 19:15.

So this is looking very bad, they are bringing in a new service starting from bordeaux to replace the one from hendaye, this new one stops. So we are now looking at getting to Paris for 19:15, assuming that this new one ultimately will start from Hendaye.
We need to see if it's possible to get from Hendaye to Bordeaux in 4 hours by bus if this service isnt re-instated.
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I just spoke to Dan at Ffestiniog about this Hendaye problem. He thinks we might have to cab it from Irun to Hendaye, but he doesn’t think there should be a problem with this 12:30 out of Hendaye come next summer.
Also, he hasn’t heard of any other sleeper cancellations other than the Amsterdam-Moscow one which is being split into 2 services with a change in Warsaw. i.e nothing bad from croatia, serbia or romania, and def not from trenhotel.

We may still have to start getting creative about how to get to Sarajevo, but we'll just have to wait till next month to see what's left. I am still lamenting this Sagan-8 narrow gauge that, right up to the 70s, ran all the way from Belgrade to Sarajevo. It must have been one of the longest narrow gauge runs anywhere. Come on Mick, tell us you did it and I can go fluorescent green.
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This might be worthy of it's own thread.
One of the group, and me too actually, want to do some serious reading up on European railway history, can I have some book suggestions for the development of European railways. I don’t think he's too interested in locomotive development, but something about the Brunels, Stephensons, Watkins etc of the mainland, whoever they may be. Or something about specific great railways, though obviously ones that we are actually going on.
I guess the Bernina might have a story, though people tend to talk about the oberalp, even though the Bernina is higher, and still adhesion. Then there's the transalpina, which I know has some stories from WWI.
A lot of this is probably available for free on t'internet, but it's worth compiling a list of links if so.

 

[Golghar]

This might be worthy of it's own thread.
One of the group, and me too actually, want to do some serious reading up on European railway history, can I have some book suggestions for the development of European railways. I don’t think he's too interested in locomotive development, but something about the Brunels, Stephensons, Watkins etc of the mainland, whoever they may be. Or something about specific great railways, though obviously ones that we are actually going on.
I guess the Bernina might have a story, though people tend to talk about the oberalp, even though the Bernina is higher, and still adhesion. Then there's the transalpina, which I know has some stories from WWI.
A lot of this is probably available for free on t'internet, but it's worth compiling a list of links if so.

The German Railway History Society (DGEG) maintains its archives and library at Dortmund, quite close to where I live. I daresay most of their material is in German.

 

[Glenmutchkin]

Don't know if the links mentioned on this thread have been explored yet.

http://www.railforums.co.uk/showthread.php?t=74695


and a map of Bruxelles Midi

http://www.railforums.co.uk/showpost.php?p=1259432&postcount=21

 

[Mark_Lester]

I've been paging through the wiki year by year stuff, there's virtually nothing in there about anything in the Balkans. And there's remarkably little catalogued about Germany either, which I guess is a result of their being a wikipedia.de, but it's whopping great hole in the english wiki record.
There's not a great deal about Iberia either, though I did come across the Gloria elavador, 1886, which was originally water driven!.
According to my wikisearch, the oldest "track" we do seems to be the stretch south out of Amsterdam opened in 1843, the line down to Dover not making it till the following year, and the Eastern Counties and Thames Junction Railway, aka North London Line, not making it till 1846.
But I need to do this in German now, as right now I dont have a date for a single yard, or metre, of track that we cover.

 

[Golghar]

If you need any specific information I can look it up on the German pages.

 

[Mark_Lester]

I'll have a punt on this myself and if I get nowhere, I'll come crying. I just thought I'd try and work out the ages of the railways, which has been interesting just looking at the development across the continent.
Latvia for instance probably had more rail miles per person than anywhere, maybe even Britain, by 1880. The wiki data is obviously skewed. Just about any UK line has been listed, where as there is very little elsewhere outside Scandinavia and Italy.
There is literally nothing listed south of about Vienna, though I did update the category listing for the Bohinj railway.
Hamburg-Berlin must have been done in the 40s surely, though I know that in 1850 more steel was being made by hand in crucibles in Germany than with a Bessemer converter. But by the turn of the century they were making more steel than Britain, and by 1914 I think twice as much.
The line from Dresden to Prague should be easy enough to work out, but these Balkan ones are going to be a lot harder.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin–Hamburg_Railway, well that wasnt very hard, these just havent been categorized.
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After actually bothering to read some of this, the line at Ashford was in place in 1842, and the Amsterdam Arnhem line, started the year after, took 13 years to build anyway. So the earliest railway path we will take, with admittedly some significant recent expansion, (I guess HS1 is actually completely separate) is going to be on the motherland.

 

[Golghar]

The original building of the terminus in Berlin of the Hamburg Berlin line is just a short walk from Berlin Hauptbahnhof. It is now an art museum. http://berlin.barwick.de/travel-transport/stations/hamburger-bahnhof.html

On the journey from Amsterdam to Copenhagen you will cover a section of the Altona-Kiel railway, which opened in 1844. This railway lay within the Duchy of Holstein which was then under the Danish crown so that makes it the first railway in Denmark.