At least two readers have missed me. Where are you? Are you ill? The simple explanation is that I have been taking a post-holiday break from blogging and preparing for the first adventure of 2013, a seven-day train tour in southern Germany.
I left London yesterday and am settled in Augsburg, Bavaria, at the start of seven days of intense anoraking on narrow-gauge and mountain railways. I am travelling with my fellow writer, Ralf Meier who writes trainphilos.com and knows a thing or two about railways ancient and modern, mostly modern. He is covering the jaunt on his site and is very likely to give a blow-by-blow account of the activities. We are joined by a group of British train enthusiasts and one cowboy from Texas. He travelled all the way from Texas to Chigaco by train, then flew to London and joined us for the week. This is enthusiasm for you; he could teach even the most avid Macfanboy a thing or two.
Today was our first outing to the narrow-guage railway at Ochsenhausen in Upper Schwabia, between Ulm and Lake Constance. This 1956 (yes, modern) locomotive was built at the Karl Marx People’s Own Locomotive Works in Babelsberg in the former
East Germany.
Highlight of the week for me will be this Thursday when we travel to Garmisch Partenkirchen in southern Bavaria and climb Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze, on the rack-and-pinion railway. I might just find something to write about technology while I am at it.