As good as a rest ... perhaps more interesting?

[whole diary]

[Worcester_Passenger]

Latour de Carol is indeed fascinating - three gauges, each with a different electrical system.

I do recommend the Bistrot de la Gare, across the forecourt.

I thought they were couchettes on the night train rather than proper sleepers?

[grahame]

Latour de Carol is indeed fascinating - three gauges, each with a different electrical system.

I do recommend the Bistrot de la Gare, across the forecourt.

I thought they were couchettes on the night train rather than proper sleepers?

Oui, c'est couchettes. Mais sais bien.  Le bistro est ferme, mais ill y a un petit [little shopper] dans la gare.

[chuffed]

We all know that Graham is famous for his typos in English...have I spotted a French one in the shape of le homme de oncle in the shape of M Kuryakin in his last post ??!

[stuving]

Just in case you were likely to be back in France on 18th, the CGT have suddenly started talking about a strike on that day. It's a general strike and day of "action", but their position in SNCF^▸ (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais - French National Railways) is particularly strong.

[chuffed]

I remember taking the SNCF^▸ (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais - French National Railways) train into Portbou and the RENFE^▸ (Spanish National Railways (Red Nacional de Ferrocarriles Espanoles)) train back to Cebere one afternoon some years ago. On arrival in Spain, one side of the platform was all in the blue and grey of SNCF and the other side of the red and yellow of RENFE. It was the same in the shared buffet with croissants one side and tortillas the other. I half expected a Ronnie Barker type character to address me in French costume and accent on one side and then turn round and repeat it all again in Spanish. At least I was not charged in francs and pesetas because they were in the euro zone by then!!

[grahame]

An Interail pass is one series of adventures after another - the highs such as seeing the city of Leon last night and an order that went wrong and right for caneloni that delivered the most beautiful Pizza in a lovely setting, with a beer around the square as day faded into night.   The lows such as the 30 minute queue for a reservation for my next train in Barcelona.

I am writing this on the train from Leon to Oviedo and Gijon; a very thin service like many in Spain, trains at 09:20 and 09:29 then nothing until 13:40.  A land of long distances and much abandoned infrastrucure, especially on the freight side.  There are a number of passenger trains parked up and although I remember being shocked at just how thin the service was in Vigo when we stopped there on a cruise, I suspect it's even worse now post-covid as not everything has returned.

The scenery is beautiful, the train modern and a darned sight more comfortable than the hard board of yesterday's 9 hour journey.  It's electric, "of course" over here.  Incredibyly on such a sparse service, the line is being upgraded and a new high speed section opens next year; I suspect this old line will then see just the 09:29 and a train in the evening to serve the local stations.

I will try and share some pictures later - very hard, as the double glazing of the train imposes reflections of the train's insides onto my snaps, and in any case I'm busy enjoying the scenery.

[Worcester_Passenger]

Disappointed that you're not doing the one train per day from Leon to Bilbao.

[stuving]

It's electric, "of course" over here.  Incredibyly on such a sparse service, the line is being upgraded and a new high speed section opens next year; I suspect this old line will then see just the 09:29 and a train in the evening to serve the local stations.

That's kind of the Spanish way, isn't it? Most of the effort on this new line has gone into the Pajares Base Tunnel, of which Wikipedia says: "Early on, the through route was expected to be open in 2010. As of August 2022, the tunnels are expected to be open to passenger traffic by 2023". Well, some tunnels are just like that, I guess... I also found this quote from WikiZ:

Despite plans for the tunnel to be electrified by 25 kV AC throughout its 24,667 m (80,928 ft) length, questions have been raised if electrification is feasible due to the high level of water infiltration present.

But while the line from Leon to the tunnel at Pola de Gordon is being built, only a short bit on the north side to Pola de Lena is. The rest of the way will use the existing Spanish gauge line (you may remember the same being true of the line to A Coruna, with the high-speed line finishing at Ourense where that catastrophic high-speed derailment was). And the new tunnel is dual gauge too - with so few fast trains, why not use it for goods too?

[IndustryInsider]

Despite plans for the tunnel to be electrified by 25 kV AC throughout its 24,667 m (80,928 ft) length, questions have been raised if electrification is feasible due to the high level of water infiltration present.

Perhaps our boys and girls who did the Severn Tunnel could pop over and show them how it’s done? 

[stuving]

Despite plans for the tunnel to be electrified by 25 kV AC throughout its 24,667 m (80,928 ft) length, questions have been raised if electrification is feasible due to the high level of water infiltration present.

Perhaps our boys and girls who did the Severn Tunnel could pop over and show them how it’s done? 

Depends how you reckon who's whose, doesn't it? I can't see anyone credited with the engineering apart from Furrer + Frey, based on work already done elsewhere in Europe, plus a bit of independent advice from Cardiff University. Also, there's this from Modern Railways:

Could this provide an exemplar for the same solution to be adopted elsewhere? Dr Hewings points out that the combination of copper and aluminium has been widely used and does not generally present a problem, so the Severn Tunnel is probably unique. Nonetheless, in a saltwater environment where there is a risk of corrosion, NR^» (Network Rail - home page) now has another option as its disposal.

If it's just the sheer volume of water, rather than its corrosiveness, wasn't that solved for the Severn Tunnel a hundred years ago?

[grahame]

Disappointed that you're not doing the one train per day from Leon to Bilbao.

Well shucks, there's only one of me ... I can only go one way at once which I'm now doing!   Lots of impossible future quiz questions coming up.

[grahame]

I don't know where to start - well, I started on the 09:20 from Leon to Gijon, but dropped off at Oviedo and took the local metre gauge to FEVE into Gijon, connection on to Aviles, then to Pravia and finally to San Xoan, arriving there a few minutes after the scheduled 21:41 and just in time to check into my hotel while it was still staffed.

The section from Leon is through wild mountains, a torturous, spectacular and heavily engineered line which, however, takes 2 hours to cover a distance of 140 kms ... and a new line is being worked on to cut that down, with a 25 km base tunnel.   Oviedo, Gijon, and a number of other towns cluster on the middle north coast of Spain and have a thriving little local network of both broad gauge and narrow gauge trains ... with just 2 a day headed west to Ferrol and east to Santander and Bilbao.   

From Pravia, I took the afternoon train at 15:40 all the way to San Xoan - that's in the 'burbs of Ferrol near to a booked hotel. Six hours as we wound along the coastline from a lovely day to pitch black on arrival.  Bays, beaches, towns, estuaries, forests, fields and mountains.  Tunnels, viaducts, sharp bends and bridges, and wayside stations and more significant ones all along the way.

The section from Pravia to Ribadeo takes 3 hours and in that half of the journey, there's not a loop that allows two trains to pass in use - this must be one of the longest single line sections anywhere!   When we got to Ribadeo, the afternoon train headed east was waiting to go ...!   There are a couple of rusted loops that might be serviceable, but they look to me as if they've not been used for years, and many many stations where a single track runs through a site with abandoned platforms to the side.   And there are halts - in some sections of the line, the train stopping for a few seconds in the vain hope of a passenger, and in other parts just passing through where no-one waits.  They make Shippea Hill look busy.

For a line with so few passengers, the standard of upkeep of the track looks amazingly good, and I don't see how the line can make economic sense with just our 2 coach trains picking up a few people here and there.    There were perhaps 30 or 40 people on the train, odd ones getting on and off along the way.   A couple of schoolgirls returning home - perhaps for the weekend - from Pravia to one or another of the remote farm clusters served by its own station.  A dropout with trousers torn so badly it was embarrassing who got off in the middle of nowhere.  A handful of people travelling longer distances.

[grahame]

A picture paints a thousand word.   Here is the equivalent of 12,000 words

























More at (here) on my Facebook feed

[TonyK]

Switzerland?

Surprisingly, not!

The second most mountainous country in Europe?

[grahame]

Yesterday - Ferrol to Vigo

Two trains on thin-served lines, from Ferrol to A Coruna was thin on passengers, after a three hour wait at A Coruna in the pouring rain the 3 car train on to Vigo was pretty well filled.    I took the train to Vigo Guixar and there *is* another station here, and there was a bigger, slicker, electric trains 40 minutes earlier that looked very busy too, complete with airport style baggage xraying prior to boarding it.    Our diesel train went around the old line bypassed by the high speed one and called at a number of stations, ranging from ones where it did no business that I noticed through some quite busy ones.





On arrival, the train for my next step was already shown on the departure boards, so thin is service in Galacia. But there was long enough to have a look around Vigo, which I have visited previously on a cruise, and get a good night's sleep - except readers may see various posts in the wee hours as my sleep pattern is up the swanny!



I had better get going - my train has been flagged up .... ;-)