Tuesday, September 9. 2008

Trains in the rain

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It has been a long, busy summer, with visitors and visiting, short trips and longer – and all the while still making an effort to get jobs done by the deadlines (nothing was late....except some of the nights before the deadlines!). One thing that suffered was this blog. But now I‘m back from the last trip (for a while at least), have caught up with all my work, and can start thinking about the blog again.

One of the (many) things I like about living in Europe are the trains here. They are my favorite means of transportation. When I go to my friend‘s fabric shop (see my report on the appliqué class) I can either drive the car or take the train. When I drive, it takes about 45 minutes and all that I can do with that time is....well, drive the car – and if I get behind a tractor or a slow truck it takes longer, as it does if it‘s rainy or foggy or icy. When I take the train, it takes about 45 minutes and I can use the time to read, knit, sew, look out the window and dream, etc. And, of course, the train is much more environmentally friendly. Of course, I must admit that the train is occasionally late or has some other little problem, but all in all I much prefer the train to the car.

Unfortunately, not all of the people who make the decisions here in Germany seem to share my enthusiasm for the train. In the course of the last few decades, the side lines have been being closed, one by one. Which is a shame....but (as the saying goes) nothing is so bad that not some small good comes from it. The good that comes from the train lines being reduced, is that in our part of Germany several of the old train lines have been (or are being) turned into cycling paths.

One of these is very close to where I live. It‘s the train line from Ruwer (at the confluence of the Ruwer and Mosel rivers) to Hermeskeil – roughly 50 km. The ride from Ruwer to Hermeskeil is uphill, but at such a slight grade (it couldn‘t be too steep or the trains wouldn‘t have made it) that it‘s only minimally more work than riding on level ground – I think that it‘s about 1%. And riding back down even this slight grade means that you can roll without pedalling a large part of the way – the reward for riding uphill at the beginning.

For anyone who is interested, there‘s a good website.

Work has been progressing on the bike path for the last several years – levelling and asphalting the path, putting railings on bridges, and making it generally safe and bikable. A little like the railroad in the US, work was started on both ends and should meet somewhere in the middle (theoretically this year).

This last weekend, SO and I decided to see how close to being finished the cycling path is. One day we started close to Ruwer and rode (uphill) as far as we could before the pavement ran out – turned out to be about 18 kilometers. The plan for Sunday, was to put the bikes on the back of the car and drive to the other end and start our bike ride from there. The weather report had promised a dry day with some clouds and sun. What we got was a cloudy day with some rain ....and a tiny (very tiny) bit of sun. It was raining when we got to the head of the cycling path, so we decided to wait a little to see if the weather would clear up.

The head of the cycling path is at the old train station in Hermeskeil, which has partly been turned into a train museum. We had heard about the museum, but didn‘t really know anything about it. Sitting in the car, eating our picknick, we decided we‘d look into the musuem. The first thing we discovered is that the museum is only opened from April to September and then only the first weekend of each month. Unbelievably it was the first weekend in September – the museum was open! So we went in, and were certainly glad we did! It‘s amazing! About 50 old steam locomotives – some of them outdoors and some in an old round house (or round house section...there‘s probably a better official term). The rain had stopped, so we wandered around the grounds a little and discovered that rainy days are perfect for photographing old steam engines – it makes them shine and brings out the details. Outdoors the engines are rusting and being reclaimed by nature – a young birch tree growing in a tender, moss on wooden parts – which is a shame, but it also has its own poetry. The 6 or so steam engines indoors are of course in better shape and each has a hand-written sheet of information attached to its side. The round house smells like metal and oil. The engines themselves are huge! I climbed up into the cab of one. It must have been quite a feeling for the engineer to be in charge of such a gigantic piece of machinery – it‘s easy to understand the fascination that the old engines held and hold.

By the time we had finished looking at the trains, the weather had cleared marginally and we did ride our bikes a little (although not to the end of the asphalt from the upper end) before it started raining again – but the serendipitous discovery of the day was without a doubt the train museum!

Here are a few photos to give you an idea of the museum