Travel The Hangar Train/Locomotive thread

[Howard Moon]

We have the aviation thread, which I’ve been a part of but I’d like to put forward a counter thread – the Rail and locomotive thread.

I’m far from being a trainspotter, I’m not guy who knows the rail gauges and the ins and outs like some do, or I’ve never had model railways.. But what I do know is, travelling by train is the most regal way to travel. That’s nothing against air travel, or the machines that make it possible, but to me air travel is something you endure, air travel is the means of transport to get somewhere that you put up with til you can start your holiday, I reckon the train is so much more than that. The train can be a part of your experience – I just get a warm and fuzzy feeling when I think about train trips I have taken, I get pangs of nostalgia like I want to go back and do more and more and more… How many times have you ever thought back to a flight and said, remember that cool flight we took? I wish I was there again! Or a bus… just get me off this thing!

Moon tangent time… I reckon air travel is dehumanising, for a start, you are in the air, a place humans are not designed to freely be, then you are in a compressed air – it almost feels as if you have checked away from earth for a period of time, you are sectioned off into a little square seat, given a little square meal on little square tray, but the overall dynamic is tinged with anxiousness and non comfort.. That’s not to say you are scared, but you are always counting down the minutes til you are there, til you can relax, stretch, walk the earth again…. Air travel is like a cigarette, a ticking time bomb.. jittery, fast, quick! Gotta suck it down before it burns away! Manic inhale… Train travel is a fat cigar..lets relax, sit back, feet up, enjoy the view out the window, the rolling endless fields as the train flows along sweeping tracks, smooth. Like a cigar train travel is slow, contemplative, enjoyable, you are not stacked in little squares, more often than not you are facing somebody else, its convivial, you are following tracks that have been there since the forefathers built the railways, you are traveling history. The locomotive era harks back to times when the world was booming and the train was the place to be. But you are sitting amongst humanity at its essence, the people of the country you are in living their daily lives, not flying above them.

…and Im not talking about your shitty metro trains here, nor am I talking about your classic baby boomer inland cruise on some over priced moving cruise ship on rails with glass ceilings and all the bells and whistles bereft of riff raff..… I’m talking about your warts and all inter city train, im talking about the life blood of the country, the thing the breathes life into small country towns, as it makes its journey, you see hugs and tears from country folk as their link to the rest of the world arrives. You see people selling their wares as their only source of income arrives and departs.

I get sad that Australia missed the rail boom, sure we have freight trains carrying ore here there and everywhere, but I guess the sparseness of our and makes the train a non option.

Its one of my favourite things caching a train in a post colonial country where the old nasty colonialist built the railway to suck dry all its precious resources to the coast… now that very line and system that’s sucked the country dry, is its life blood.., decaying, rusting, barley functional has become a way of life for the people that are left behind. In some places there are no roads, there are just inhospitable landscapes, and the rail. But those flaws are what makes it fun, every chink in its armour, makes the trip worth taking, so you’ve been delayed a few more hours? Just enjoy the time, grab some hawker food.. Busses get delayed, you get angry, ditto planes, but the train trip can be part of the holiday, the clock doesn’t have to be ticking. If you needed to be somehwere by deadline, you’d have got the plane.

If you haven’t rocked to sleep on an overnight sleeper train, hypnotised by the rhythmic clack clack, clack clack, you haven’t lived!

I’m addicted to rail tv shows, like great continental rail journeys, like Chris Tarrant extreme railways, nothing makes me want to travel more than watching these shows… you can keep your getaways and their junkets, the rail show is the thing that will make me pull out my wallet and book a trip.

There isn’t a better feeling than walking into a grand European station, looking at the board and thinking I could be in any one of 15 different countries just by getting on a train here, Europe is probably the perfect rail destination, all those countries and cultures and wedged in, covered by a spider web of tracks.

Where rail here is a last resort, rail in many places in Africa, the subcontinent, south America, is the only resort! It’s a country within a country, some people live in the train system, they are the system. 1.54 million people work for the Indian rail, its mental! that’s without thinking of the nomads or homeless who call the system home…

Anyway, enough jibber jabber, no pissing contest, but what fun/great rail journeys have you taken around the world? (or at home) I’m going to venture a guess that everyone has travel stories, that’s what travelling is about, and everyone has a rail story…good bad or indifferent.

Its funny, it’s easy to look at a map and say yeh that will be doable to get from there to there in a day..i guess one of the more ambitious trains we took in Europe was From Barcelona to Rome, that’s a fair old hike in one go!! Was funny that we were kind of in and out of sleep, but we left speaking Spanish, changed locomotives to the sound of French, then again to Italian, One trip, three different languages, had to be on the ball that’s for sure. Not to mention the fact twice when we arrived into the new country the last two carriages of the train split off and went in another directions. If you didn’t have your wits about you you’d end up in bloody Switzerland or Serbia or something…

But this trip had views of everything, the Spanish country side, the Pyrenees, the French country side, the French Riviera, then Italian mountains, and Tuscan hills all the way into Rome. Anyhow, I met some randoms on that train that we still speak to today, that’s what trains can do.


Train tales anyone? Suggested journeys? iconic trips? types of trains been on?

 

[Kakkle]

We have the aviation thread, which I’ve been a part of but I’d like to put forward a counter thread – the Rail and locomotive thread.

I’m far from being a trainspotter, I’m not guy who knows the rail gauges and the ins and outs like some do, or I’ve never had model railways.. But what I do know is, travelling by train is the most regal way to travel. That’s nothing against air travel, or the machines that make it possible, but to me air travel is something you endure, air travel is the means of transport to get somewhere that you put up with til you can start your holiday, I reckon the train is so much more than that. The train can be a part of your experience – I just get a warm and fuzzy feeling when I think about train trips I have taken, I get pangs of nostalgia like I want to go back and do more and more and more… How many times have you ever thought back to a flight and said, remember that cool flight we took? I wish I was there again! Or a bus… just get me off this thing!

Moon tangent time… I reckon air travel is dehumanising, for a start, you are in the air, a place humans are not designed to freely be, then you are in a compressed air – it almost feels as if you have checked away from earth for a period of time, you are sectioned off into a little square seat, given a little square meal on little square tray, but the overall dynamic is tinged with anxiousness and non comfort.. That’s not to say you are scared, but you are always counting down the minutes til you are there, til you can relax, stretch, walk the earth again…. Air travel is like a cigarette, a ticking time bomb.. jittery, fast, quick! Gotta suck it down before it burns away! Manic inhale… Train travel is a fat cigar..lets relax, sit back, feet up, enjoy the view out the window, the rolling endless fields as the train flows along sweeping tracks, smooth. Like a cigar train travel is slow, contemplative, enjoyable, you are not stacked in little squares, more often than not you are facing somebody else, its convivial, you are following tracks that have been there since the forefathers built the railways, you are traveling history. The locomotive era harks back to times when the world was booming and the train was the place to be. But you are sitting amongst humanity at its essence, the people of the country you are in living their daily lives, not flying above them.

…and Im not talking about your shitty metro trains here, nor am I talking about your classic baby boomer inland cruise on some over priced moving cruise ship on rails with glass ceilings and all the bells and whistles bereft of riff raff..… I’m talking about your warts and all inter city train, im talking about the life blood of the country, the thing the breathes life into small country towns, as it makes its journey, you see hugs and tears from country folk as their link to the rest of the world arrives. You see people selling their wares as their only source of income arrives and departs.

I get sad that Australia missed the rail boom, sure we have freight trains carrying ore here there and everywhere, but I guess the sparseness of our and makes the train a non option.

Its one of my favourite things caching a train in a post colonial country where the old nasty colonialist built the railway to suck dry all its precious resources to the coast… now that very line and system that’s sucked the country dry, is its life blood.., decaying, rusting, barley functional has become a way of life for the people that are left behind. In some places there are no roads, there are just inhospitable landscapes, and the rail. But those flaws are what makes it fun, every chink in its armour, makes the trip worth taking, so you’ve been delayed a few more hours? Just enjoy the time, grab some hawker food.. Busses get delayed, you get angry, ditto planes, but the train trip can be part of the holiday, the clock doesn’t have to be ticking. If you needed to be somehwere by deadline, you’d have got the plane.

If you haven’t rocked to sleep on an overnight sleeper train, hypnotised by the rhythmic clack clack, clack clack, you haven’t lived!

I’m addicted to rail tv shows, like great continental rail journeys, like Chris Tarrant extreme railways, nothing makes me want to travel more than watching these shows… you can keep your getaways and their junkets, the rail show is the thing that will make me pull out my wallet and book a trip.

There isn’t a better feeling than walking into a grand European station, looking at the board and thinking I could be in any one of 15 different countries just by getting on a train here, Europe is probably the perfect rail destination, all those countries and cultures and wedged in, covered by a spider web of tracks.

Where rail here is a last resort, rail in many places in Africa, the subcontinent, south America, is the only resort! It’s a country within a country, some people live in the train system, they are the system. 1.54 million people work for the Indian rail, its mental! that’s without thinking of the nomads or homeless who call the system home…

Anyway, enough jibber jabber, no pissing contest, but what fun/great rail journeys have you taken around the world? (or at home) I’m going to venture a guess that everyone has travel stories, that’s what travelling is about, and everyone has a rail story…good bad or indifferent.

Its funny, it’s easy to look at a map and say yeh that will be doable to get from there to there in a day..i guess one of the more ambitious trains we took in Europe was From Barcelona to Rome, that’s a fair old hike in one go!! Was funny that we were kind of in and out of sleep, but we left speaking Spanish, changed locomotives to the sound of French, then again to Italian, One trip, three different languages, had to be on the ball that’s for sure. Not to mention the fact twice when we arrived into the new country the last two carriages of the train split off and went in another directions. If you didn’t have your wits about you you’d end up in bloody Switzerland or Serbia or something…

But this trip had views of everything, the Spanish country side, the Pyrenees, the French country side, the French Riviera, then Italian mountains, and Tuscan hills all the way into Rome. Anyhow, I met some randoms on that train that we still speak to today, that’s what trains can do.


Train tales anyone? Suggested journeys? iconic trips? types of trains been on?

Nice!

 

[boncer34]

As someone who's only experience on a train is V/Line, Melbourne public transport and Sydney airport link...... you're mental.

Trains are slow, uncomfortable, boring modes of transport.

Admittedly I reckon going through Europe via rail would change my mind.

 

[Lore]

We have a couple transnational trains in Australia that I’d love to go on. The Ghan and the Indian-Pacific particularly. There’s also a couple of decent lines in Queensland, outside of short distance tourist railways (e.g. puffing billy) and steamrail (which runs on a main line). Pretty sure I’ve been on most of the little tourist ones in Victoria and some in NSW and Tas haha, including the miniature ones... most of them a couple of times each. (That was my childhood)

 

[Howard Moon]

We have a couple transnational trains in Australia that I’d love to go on. The Ghan and the Indian-Pacific particularly. There’s also a couple of decent lines in Queensland, outside of short distance tourist railways (e.g. puffing billy) and steamrail (which runs on a main line). Pretty sure I’ve been on most of the little tourist ones in Victoria and some in NSW and Tas haha, including the miniature ones... most of them a couple of times each. (That was my childhood)

did you try the one in straguhn , tassie or the kurunda railway up near cairns?

we have the eltham mini railway near us, petty funny to see how into it the people that run it are, all the signaling and what not down to the smallest details

 

[Zephyr Spirally]

This is my kind of thread. I have 2 responses. The first is:
I used to own a house in Flemington that was wedged between the Broadmeadows/Craigiebuen railway line at the front and the Showgrounds/racecourse line at the back. I lost it in the divorce. I loved the trains. I would often stay up to watch the freight train go by at about 11:30pm. And if there was a steam rail trip going past I was very excited.
But I really loved the percussive rhythmic sound the trains made, especially at night. I listened to them actively and found comfort in the noise. I kind of felt I was never alone, as my life was being witnessed by the passengers going past all day long. That would be less is as they’re just witnessing their smart phones these days. But I miss that house, mainly for the trains. And I love the connection to the past that trains give us. A wonderful continuity. That racecourse line I think was open in time for the first Melbourne cup.

 

[Howard Moon]

This is my kind of thread. I have 2 responses. The first is:
I used to own a house in Flemington that was wedged between the Broadmeadows/Craigiebuen railway line at the front and the Showgrounds/racecourse line at the back. I lost it in the divorce. I loved the trains. I would often stay up to watch the freight train go by at about 11:30pm. And if there was a steam rail trip going past I was very excited.
But I really loved the percussive rhythmic sound the trains made, especially at night. I listened to them actively and found comfort in the noise. I kind of felt I was never alone, as my life was being witnessed by the passengers going past all day long. That would be less is as they’re just witnessing their smart phones these days. But I miss that house, mainly for the trains. And I love the connection to the past that trains give us. A wonderful continuity. That racecourse line I think was open in time for the first Melbourne cup.

that's the thing isn't it, usually when an invention is super seeded by something new it falls by the way side - unless they actually become part of the fabric..

Since the rail boom, we have had cars, busses, planes - all these 'superior' modes of transport..

...and sure there are faster or easier or more productive ways to travel, but the rail will always reign.. I think of it like the LP record. The tape, the CD, or the Digital format has become far clearer or crisper or more functionally perfect...yet we still hang onto records, even choose to go back to them for their warmth of character..

Once those train lines were built, life built around them...trace the lines through cities or counties and you can see life growing around those lines, you can follow history. Often the train stations in large cities or small towns are the oldest , or most historic building left after the church - even the most glamorous, harking back to a different time

 

[Zephyr Spirally]

The second response is that I wholeheartedly agree about train travel overseas. I too watch all the train shows on the telly. Even Michael Portillo and his natty suits.
Train travel is both luxurious and democratic. I don’t mean physically(though of course it is that too). I mean luxurious in that it gives you time and head space. There is a forced passivity as the train goes where it’s goibg. Democratic in the way it opened up travel for the masses but also in that despite the comfort of the seat everyone on the train is going to arrive together.

Whenever I think of my trips I think the sweetest memories are the ones of sitting in trains with my partner, with a wine if it’s late enough, maybe chatting, maybe sitting in easy silence, or maybe listening to other passengers conversations.
Spotting distant church spires or villages as we hurtle past, anticipating the next stop along the journey. I love the cafes in European train stations.
I’ll have to think about a particular triop, it may be yet to come as I am planning a trip in the orient express for my next big birthday. lovely thread Howard Moon!

 

[Zephyr Spirally]

Oh and a little bit of Melbourne train trivia...
the old Harris trains (blue trains) were buried in Clayton due to that being the most effective way to deal with the asbestos in them. I think there are other trains buried in Newport.

Confession time. I am something of a train spotter and have spent many hours on rail forums.

 

[Lore]

did you try the one in straguhn , tassie or the kurunda railway up near cairns?

we have the eltham mini railway near us, petty funny to see how into it the people that run it are, all the signaling and what not down to the smallest details

There’s a few miniature lines around here, Eltham, Boxhill, Campbelltown. All run by overenthusiastic volunteers. They’re cute but a bit odd at the same time.

Yes I’ve done the Strahan - Queenstown one in Tas. Cute little train hahaha, really struggles up the hill even with rack and pinion. Castlemaine-Maldon line, the Zig Zag railway in the blue mountains before it got burnt out too.

I haven’t been as far north as Cairns yet but it’s bucket list stuff to go and look around up there.

 

[Howard Moon]

The second response is that I wholeheartedly agree about train travel overseas. I too watch all the train shows on the telly. Even Michael Portillo and his natty suits.
Train travel is both luxurious and democratic. I don’t mean physically(though of course it is that too). I mean luxurious in that it gives you time and head space. There is a forced passivity as the train goes where it’s goibg. Democratic in the way it opened up travel for the masses but also in that despite the comfort of the seat everyone on the train is going to arrive together.

Whenever I think of my trips I think the sweetest memories are the ones of sitting in trains with my partner, with a wine if it’s late enough, maybe chatting, maybe sitting in easy silence, or maybe listening to other passengers conversations.
Spotting distant church spires or villages as we hurtle past, anticipating the next stop along the journey. I love the cafes in European train stations.
I’ll have to think about a particular triop, it may be yet to come as I am planning a trip in the orient express for my next big birthday. lovely thread Howard Moon!

I have a pretty strong yearning to go on the Lhasa express from China to Tibet, its probably highest on the ist and visit the potala palace

I might dig up some photos of a place we went to in Bolivia high up at altitude where they built a train line to transport minerals, but once it all dried up they up and left the trains and everything where they stood - its now a train 'grave yard' .. rusting trains, tracks, rail yards...everything lying stagnant, its quite eerie actually

 

[Howard Moon]

There’s a few miniature lines around here, Eltham, Boxhill, Campbelltown. All run by overenthusiastic volunteers. They’re cute but a bit odd at the same time.

Yes I’ve done the Strahan - Queenstown one in Tas. Cute little train hahaha, really struggles up the hill even with rack and pinion. Castlemaine-Maldon line, the Zig Zag railway in the blue mountains before it got burnt out too.

I haven’t been as far north as Cairns yet but it’s bucket list stuff to go and look around up there.

once a year they have a festival at Hurstbridge, they run an old steam train from flinders st to Hutsbridge, then do trips all day from Etham to hurstbridge... theres just something about a steam train that makes people wave at strangers, people love it!

it heads back to Melbourne about 9pm -I usually lie in bed with the kids and listen for the old steam train horn, it bellows so loud through the night then you hear it huffing and puffing past the station...

I just love the sound of the horn, I don't know what the kids are thinking but I close my eyes and imagine im 1930 and the sounds that go with it...

 

[Howard Moon]

The second response is that I wholeheartedly agree about train travel overseas. I too watch all the train shows on the telly. Even Michael Portillo and his natty suits.
Train travel is both luxurious and democratic. I don’t mean physically(though of course it is that too). I mean luxurious in that it gives you time and head space. There is a forced passivity as the train goes where it’s goibg. Democratic in the way it opened up travel for the masses but also in that despite the comfort of the seat everyone on the train is going to arrive together.

Whenever I think of my trips I think the sweetest memories are the ones of sitting in trains with my partner, with a wine if it’s late enough, maybe chatting, maybe sitting in easy silence, or maybe listening to other passengers conversations.
Spotting distant church spires or villages as we hurtle past, anticipating the next stop along the journey. I love the cafes in European train stations.
I’ll have to think about a particular triop, it may be yet to come as I am planning a trip in the orient express for my next big birthday. lovely thread Howard Moon!

I know what you mean about those sweet travel memories - we would be so poor in Europe we couldn't afford regular hotels (more like we wanted to spend it all on food) So we would get into the carriage early, especially in Italy, close the doors, fold the seats into beds , set up sleeping bags and pretend we were lying back asleep if anyone came in... by the time we would leave that would then be our room for the night - im getting all warm and fuzzy just recalling.

 

[DapperJong]

When I was in kinder i got the train set banned. Another kid was using the bit of track that i wanted and he WOULD NOT hand it over.

So I snatched it off him and pinned him to the ground, and pressed the bit of track into his head until he started crying.

 

[Howard Moon]

When I was in kinder i got the train set banned. Another kid was using the bit of track that i wanted and he WOULD NOT hand it over.

So I snatched it off him and pinned him to the ground, and pressed the bit of track into his head until he started crying.

should have tied him to the track bandit style