Detour Into The Czech Republic

My wife and I just got back from a river cruise down the Elbe. I got hooked on European trains on my first visit to Europe in the backpack-Eurailpass-Europe on $5 a Day times in the 1960s. At the time, there was still quite a bit of steam in most countries.

My wife and I have made it back several times. One thing I've had to recognize is that my Eurailpass days are over: it takes quite a bit of agility to hump luggage up the steps from low-level station platforms and then into overhead racks -- and then there's the issue of dashing across 20 tracks or so at a station like Milano Centrale to catch a connecting train with maybe 2 minutes to spare. Plus, the TGV-ICE type trains becoming more and more common are hard to railfan from -- they go fast enough that photos from a moving train through tinted windows just won't work.

So we tried a river cruise, a much better solution for retirees. Boats are nearly as much fun as trains, much better than a bus. This cruise went from Berlin to Prague, entirely through the former East Germany and the Czech Republic. As a young railfan, I saw East German equipment only at border stations and never got to the former DDR itself until well after the wall came down. By now, the two former German rail systems have been thoroughly merged, and there isn't a whole lot left of what used to be -- not much different from railfanning BNSF or UP now.

The Czech Republic is another matter. Once we crossed the border, the Elbe River had electrified double-track main lines on both banks, each with trains running on each other's blocks. Even so, between the trees on the banks and the speed of the trains, grab shots were hard to get. Here are a few:

This is a 363 class electric, dual-voltage locomotives built by Skoda between 1980 and 1990. It is hauling an old-style conventional passenger train with 40-plus year old coaches, the kind of train that goes from city to city, swapping coaches in and out from connecting routes. You see this less and less in western Europe.

Here's a 362-class electric, a dual voltage loco built by Skoda in 1990. This is hauling empty auto racks, probably back to Skoda, the European double-deck style rack, unenclosed. The green and yellow scheme is apparently earlier than the blue on the loco above.

My best shot was of this German 189 class electric running through in the Czech Republic on a container train. This is a Siemens ES 64 F4 four-current freight loco equipped to run on all four of the common European voltages, so it can run through into the Czech Republic.

One factor for modeling more recent European trains is that the containers are very familiar to those of us on the other side of the ocean: