Rail Videos

I've been sitting on this video ever since I made it two years ago. I always intended to release it, though, since I like Germany and I love German trains. I've never done a German railway video this long before, either. I hope you all enjoy it.

I took this video on May 25th, 2013, and several months ago I released a much shorter version of this video on YouTube. It's a bit unusual in that the sound is a mixture of this steam locomotive, plus a Zlin acrobatic plane (possibly a Z526) that kept buzzing it. There's also a barking dog on the video. Unlike the earlier YouTube version of this video, the plane is actually on this one. The back story of the video is that I happened to be in Cercany at random. This was just a lucky catch, for both the locomotive and the plane.

This is the first of a series of short railfan videos that I took out of train windows while traveling from Cardiff to Prague. "Railfan" is an important qualifier here. I didn't expect any of these videos to be spectacular by themselves, Instead, they're aimed primarily (maybe only) at railfans who like to watch high-speed train videos. Technically, in modern terms, these Intercity 125 diesel trains, introduced in 1976, aren't high-speed in the modern sense. This is because their maximum legal speed is, and has always been, 125 m.p.h., or about 200 km/h, while the threshold for modern high-speed trains is about 210 km/h, set by the Japanese Series 0 bullet trains in 1966. However, the Series 0 bullet trains ran at 200 km/h from 1964 to 1966, and when the Intercity 125 diesel trains were being developed by British Railways in the 1970s, they were referred to as, literally, "High Speed Trains," or HSTs. Today, they're still often called HSTs, and remain some of the fastest diesel trains in the world, 39 years after being introduced to regular service.

After changing trains via the London Underground widened lines from Paddington to St. Pancras, to took the Eurostar to Brussels-Midi. For several years, these were the fastest trains I had ever ridden, as they operate at 190 m.p.h. in Britain. I recently found out through research (not my stopwatch) that I broke my record several months after I took this video, as I had unknowingly ridden at 330 km/h, or 205 m.p.h., on the TGV Duplex between Strasbourg and Paris. I remember the ride was fast, but that's it. The train was very overcrowded, I didn't have a window seat, and ultimately I didn't take any photos or video, which is a shame.

After taking the Eurostar to Brussels, the next leg of the trip to Prague is from Brussels Midi to Koln Hbf, where there is the sleeper train, EC457 the "Phoenix," to Prague, which departs at 2228, and gets into Prague at 0925 the next day. In km/h, the Phoenix isn't necessarily slow (if I'm not mistaken, it's allowed to go 200), but the trip takes all night due to a 20-minute stop in Berlin Sudkreuz, and more importantly, the fact that it runs via Berlin at all. In this video, however, I'm still on the ICE, enjoying close to 250 km/h running.

This was about where I discovered that the Pentax MZ-10 wouldn't be working for the convention, so this video starts as we arrive in Florence, Vermont, where Omya have a Limestone quarry and slurry plant. This excursion was operated by Vermont Railway EMD GP40 #301, and GP40-2LW #311, using Green Mountain Railroad passenger stock.

This was the excursion to Hoosic Junction mentioned in my earlier photo from North Bennington. My camera battery started to die when we got to North Bennington, so footage beyond that point is not included. To reiterate, this excursion included Vermont Railway #301, an EMD GP40, and #311, a GP40-2LW, for motive power, and Green Mountain Railroad coaching stock. You can see Amtrak's Ethan Allen Express at the beginning.

This is an excerpt of the video I took on the last day of the NRHS Convention, during the Father's Day excursion on the Green Mountain Railroad. This is a brutal cut from the original, as I needed it to be under 10 minutes, and under 30MB, so it's less than a fifth of the original cut, with the original MOD files being much longer.