TRIVIA: Things you saw travelling on mainland European railways that you don't see today

[AY1975]

NS-gates cannot NOT handle 72 hr tix-they can only handle tix for the day untill 4 hrs next morning and then additional days. This differs from the validators on board bus/tram.

Does that mean you have to use the gateline intercom if you have a 72 hr ticket? (I know this is getting off topic really, though, as this is a thread about things you used to see on mainland European railways that you no longer see.)

 

[AY1975]

Party or disco cars (usually called "Partywagen" or "Gesellschaftswagen" (literally social or "society" car) in Germany) - I don't know if they still exist at all. I believe that some charter trains still have them, but you also used to get them on some overnight trains. I think some SNCF night trains, and some of the now withdrawn Belgian international overnight trains, used to have disco cars.

I once remember seeing a DB train in the Netherlands with a "Gesellschaftswagen" in about 1988 with people dancing at about 10 or 11am, which seemed rather bizarre!

 

[AlexNL]

Disco cars are still a thing in seasonal trains from the Netherlands from the Alps

 

[30907]

Disco cars are still a thing in seasonal trains from the Netherlands from the Alps

Do the German booze train excursions still run?

 

[AlexNL]

There are still charter trains from Germany to the Netherlands, yes. And I'm pretty sure they include booze

 

[Fireless]

the other thing lost" when the DDR went was a "normal" service on the extant narrow gauge lines , well into the evening and items such as light freight and newspapers carried . Also standard gauge wagons carried on transporter wagons.

There have been a lot of changes in eastern Germany after the reunification resulting a drop of traffic caused by both competition on the road and significant changes in population and economy (a lot of the eastern german industry went down the drain).
Yet, some bits of the magic of the eastern german narrow gauge railways still live on.
The Lößnitzgrundbahn near Dresden has a steam hauled morning commuter train on school days departing Radebeul Ost at 0515hrs and returning from Radeburg at 0625hrs.
The HSB also still carries standard gauge wagons to and from a quarry but they use Rollbocks (transport trucks) for that.

Manned, manually operated level crossings. At least in western Europe.

There are still quite a few of them in Germany which are usually controlled from the signalbox nearby.

 

[bspahh]

There are still charter trains from Germany to the Netherlands, yes. And I'm pretty sure they include booze

You can hire a train to run on the KVB metro lines around Cologne. This is Google Translate's view of the site:
https://translate.google.com/transl...ahn.de/freizeit/partybahn/Seiten/default.aspx

 

[AY1975]

coaches with different coloured upholstery for smoking and non-smoking accommodation. Until the 1980s or '90s Switzerland had green seats for non-smoking and red for smoking in second class, and first class had green/turquoise for non-smoking and orange for smoking. The former East German Deutsche Reichsbahn had red seats for non-smoking and dark brown for smoking.

SNCF Corail open saloon coaches originally had pale grey ceilings in the non-smoking and dark blue ceilings in the smoking sections. When built in the mid to late 1970s, they had about half smoking and half non-smoking accommodation, but as the amount of non-smoking accommodation increased you could no longer always go by the colour of the ceiling. Today, AFAIK almost all trains everywhere in mainland Europe are completely non-smoking.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, until Belgian Railways banned smoking on all trains in about 2004, most Belgian trains had a blue stripe beneath the windows to denote smoking accommodation.

For a short while in the mid-2000s when smoking was banned on all Swiss trains but still allowed on German ICE and InterCity/EuroCity trains, SBB insisted that smoking be banned on German ICE/IC/EC trains that ran into Switzerland while they were in Switzerland.