Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: coach

The next part of our tour was going to be on the Glacier Express, so here it is waiting in the station. The Glacier Express is arguably even more famous than the Bernina Express, and is one of the slower "express" trains in the world, although probably not the "slowest," as its advertising claims. The large windows wrapping around the roof indicate its real purpose, as a scenic, but modern, tourist train. It is jointly operated by the Matterhorn-Gotthard-Bahn and the Rhätische Bahn, who also operate the Bernina Express, connecting in Chur. We ultimately took the Glacier Express to Chur, but skipped the Bernina Express on this trip.

Here's one of the steam radiators. These may look strangely crude, but this same type of finned piping is used to make radiators in many Czech buildings too.

Here's a shot of the road number.

Here's an interior shot of #Be-3979, one of the old-fashioned wooden third-class coaches on our train.

Many of the cars on our train had steam heat, however, but many had steam heat but no diaphragms, meaning that I could get cool shots of the steam flowing up from the leaky hoses.

This was after I got on. As I've said already, CSD kept some very old fashioned passenger car technology until comparatively late in their history, with some wooden passenger cars from the 1940's being heated by coal stoves like this one. American and British trains stopped using these with the advent of steam heating in the 1880's and 1890's, as the combination of coal stoves and wooden construction was thought to constitute a fire hazard.

Here are some older coaches again. These ones have 1890's-style closed platforms, depressed a bit from the rest of the carbodies, but in all likelihood these are of much more recent vintage.

Here's a fairly-modern 2nd Class smooth side streamline coach, of what vintage I don't know. Streamline equipment generally didn't come into use on CSD until the 1960's, so it's probably from sometime around then. Again, a spotter's guide for passenger cars would be good to have.

This is a second shot of the same car. I note that the destination board appears to be from a very recent excursion.

This is an old open-platform wooden coach, which appears to be in pretty good shape, good enough to be serviceable. It's possible to see coaches like this on excursion trains in the Czech Republic, and my understanding is that they were used quite late in mainline and branchline service, too. Some were in fact built as late as the 1940's, in spite of being 50 years out of date by that point.

Eurocity services between Prague and Munich are at least partly contracted out to Arriva at the moment. Given Arriva's history in Britain, this surprises me, although we weren't too horribly late into Munich in the end, just late. Some of this was Ceske Drahy's fault (or rather the fault of the Czech track authority), though, as most of the delays happened in Plzensky Kraj. The ALEX coaches include many ex-CD coaches like this one, mildly rebuilt with new seats.

I didn't originally know all the specifics of this yard, as I'm not from the area, but was clearly a New Jersey Transit yard since the trains are EMU's, and the yard is on the wrong side of the Hudson to be a Metro North yard. Stevensiegel260 gave me this on Flickr: "Technically, your photo is not of Newark... it's of the Town of Kearny. To the right is the Pulaski Skyway heading toward Jersey City, which is on the other side of the Hackensack River. The train lines are New Jersey Transit's Midtown Direct/Morris & Essex Lines and the Port Authority's PATH rapid transit line." It's not too far from Newark Libery International Airport, where we would be landing on this trip.

Rymane was a more spartan affair. That house there isn't the station, and I can't remember if Rymane has one or not, or if it's just a halt.

I'm not aware of how long this old passenger coach has been sitting here, up against the wall of the Dlouha Brana, and not too far from Hlavni Nadrazi. The nightclub who currently appear to be using it, Club Semafor, were celebrating their 40th anniversary, however.

Ceske Drahy inherited a fleet of Russian bi-level coaches from Ceskoslovenske Drahy, and these are still in service, if old (see my picture of Tynec yard). They're cramped, dirty, somewhat rundown, and very hot in the summer, though, so they're far from ideal, even if the view from the upper deck is cool. Ceske Drahy must have been thinking of this, as well as the better passenger capacity in proportion to tare, when they ordered their fleet of bi-level EMUs, Classes 471 and 971, from a consortium of CKD and Skoda in the late 1990s. The oldest of these is already 10 years old, but surprisingly, they've been kept up enough so that they still seem relatively new. The upper deck is the best part, though. :-) I took this on the way to Karlstejn.

I'm pretty sure this was a coach based on a Class 810 railbus, rather than a real railbus. Some of these are powered railbuses, while some are pulled by small diesel locomotives or by 810s. They're used on branchlines, mainly, although I've ridden in an 810 at up to 80Km/h on the Decin-Prague mainline before.

This is one of the express trains for Ceske Budejovice, and on this particular day (January 26th, 2007) it looked like it was all set to be packed to standing room only with skiiers, in spite of having over 10 cars on.