Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: HSR

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.

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.

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.

Koln Hbf sees a lot of ICE traffic. This appears to have been a Class 403 ICE, also called a Velaro. Built by Seimens from 1999 to (officially, at least) 2010, when it was superseded by the Class 407. In the interim, a multi-current version, the Class 406, was also produced. All of these trainsets have been very fast. They were perhaps the first ever trains designed to cruise at 330Km/h, or 205 m.p.h. On speed tests in 2006, a Class 406 achieved a top speed of 407.6 Km/h, or 250.8 m.p.h., which wasn't a world speed record for a train, but a world record for an unmodified production train. The original Class 403 set a speed record for the class of 368 Km/h, or 228.66 m.p.h., in 1999 (to the best of my knowledge, as it was on the original tests).

This was a less blurred and distorted shot of a Pendolino passing us, but I still didn't get the number because the coupler cover was open, and this is normally where the number is.

This is a crop of the previous shot, illustrating the advantages of film, although I feel like I could have focused it better. I'm a little bit skeptical about the adjustment of the eyepiece of my camera (it adjusts to your glasses prescription, and I don't know how to set it 100% right).

This is a shot I got from the old bridge on the old Linka 011. Obviously, when I saw the chance for a shot of the Pendolino I didn't turn it down.