Thanks. So 5 years ago the standard gauge was heavily overgrown in places and obviously long disused. I wonder when it was last used?
Namur : a train station with a bus station on its roof (still under construction )
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Yes, looks as if the Spanish side had been recently relaid (with the rationalisation at Puigcerda?), but not the French. The next bit towards Barcelona needs it: there is a long emergency 30km/h adding 9min to journey time.Very nice video. Amazing to notice how bad the track condition is in France compared to Spain... Also, the border is clearly visible, but I saw no "change of railway administration" signs that are normally present at all railway borders.
Pontresina on the Bernina-Bahn in Switzerland is another.There are several others. Aachen has at least two commutable tracks, Basel at least one. Certainly many others. Some have disappeared recently with the generalization of multi-system locos : Quevy, Jeumont, Luxemburg.
Andač, somewhere in Slovakia on the line between Bratislava and Nitra, isn't exactly the world's biggest station. That's the entire station, by the way, there wasn't anything on the other side of the line at all.
This isn't that unusual. I've also caught a train from Prague-Smichov, heading up on the branch line through Zlicin (this has now been converted to light rail, with a new stop in front of the station). To get to the platform, you had to head through the (frankly rather decrepit) main station, up a tiny staircase out the back, then wait with a crowd on the edge of what looked like a marshalling yard. As the train pulled in, you clambered over the tracks to find it, then howked yourself up the steps.
In Melbourne, Australia, there's the four-track City Loop which (as the name suggests) takes a good fraction of the city's heavy-rail suburban trains in a loop around the city centre, via several underground stations along the way, to a nominal terminus at Flinders Street station.
Reversible lines are reasonably common on urban railways around the world to deal with peak flows, but I'm not aware of anywhere else like these three stations, where every platform changes its direction in the middle of the day.
For years we've been visiting the island of Lindau, in the south west corner of Bayern, which is arrived at via a causeway. The Hbf has until now been accepting electric trains from the Swiss and Austrian federal railways, journeying round the lake from Bregenz in Austria. Meanwhile the German trains, which greatly outnumber the electrics are diesel hauled, either DB or ALEX trains. Only platforms 1-3 are electrified and the Swiss have a small number of Re4/4 11 locos specially adapted to run under German centenary.
Approval has been granted to electrify the line from here to Munich, and so this uniqueness will soon end, though trains towards Kempten and Friedrichshafen will continue to be diesel hauled. Adjacent to the station is the harbour on Lake Constance, where there are regular departures to destinations around the lake, and of course the bus station.
When I was in Melbourne for AusRail in 2015, there was much talk of a second river crossing. Is that going ahead?
Yes, it's part of the Metro tunnel project: https://metrotunnel.vic.gov.au/
I think Liechtenstein's railway needs a mention. A very basic service, with 4-5 trains a day on Mon-Fri, mostly during 'peaks' but there is one around midday which I observed earlier this year (very few people got on/off). The main station in the country is Schaan-Vaduz, with just one platform, and the station looked unstaffed. The capital Vaduz doesn't have a station, the closest being at Schaan (hence the station name). It is operated by OBB, the Austrian state railway, with 2 car (I think they were 2 car) trains.
Schaan-Vaduz has quite a traditional historic building (which I think still had a waiting room inside), right opposite the very modern bus station at Schaan. Plenty of other trains pass along this line, without stopping in Liechtenstein. There are 2 other stations on the line
This contrasts to the frequent and modern bus network, which even includes double-deckers. On my observations, it seems most people enter/ exit the country by train at Buchs (Switzerland) or Feldkirch (Austria) and use the buses which are much busier.
If you ever visit Innsbruck, it's possible to visit Liechtenstein on a day trip which is what I did. It was certainly a bizarre experience (in a good way!)
Yes - bizarre little country; operates almost as part of Switzerland for some purposes (eg currency [and buses] - though it is officially part of the EEA, as Austria is, whilst Switzerland isn't), and almost as part of Austria for others (eg railways).
The 4-5 trains a day mentioned are indeed outnumbered by all the other trains running through Lichtenstein, day and night, which almost never stop there - namely the international trains on the one and only east-west [OK - actually pretty wiggly in those parts] route between Austria and Switzerland.
Prague Hlavni: The historic station building is cut off from the city by a dual carriageway, and you enter through a modern building on the city side of the road; if you look up when on the way to the platforms, you find that you have passed under the road and are in the bottom of the old building, but if I remember rightly it's not obvious unless you look up.
The "new" station was built in the 1970s and refurbished in 2011.
(I know that you wrote "new (as is currently in vogue)" but people might not realise how old it is.)
I undestand that during the cold war, foreign travellers were allowed on some trans siberian trains, albeit not as far as Vladivistok, that was a city forbidden to strangers. When the train line was close to the chinese border, it was also forbidden to look through the windows on the train's south side. But to find such a similar experience in 2016...
That's the other detached station I was thinking of back at #7.
A few years ago the "Prague Semmering" trains started from a tiny platform called Na Knizeci at the far end of a derelict goods yard, but convenient for a bus station and tram stop. They currently leave from (somewhere near?) a platform by the Regiojet carriage sidings called "Smichov West Platform" (and run through from Hlavni).
Then there's Prague Bubny, where they extended the service into a goods siding, built a "platform" and called it Bubny Vltavska - simply to make a convenient interchange with Vltavska Metro station during engineering works (which is still in use). Shows what's possible with ground level platforms