Something different: Austrian Alps

Folks,

Here's something seasonal, some photos from a 2006 trip between the Austrian ski resort town of Zell am See to Munich, the capital of Bavaria in Germany.

1. The railway station at Zell am See, a town of about 10,000 people on the main line through the Tyrolean alps.

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2. Our train, consisting of OBB loco-hauled regional stock, waits in the snow. This train was a mixture of open and compartment carriages.

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3. The compartments had plenty of room for six people, or in this case, five people and a toy dog!

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4. Pulling out of Zell, the train wends its way between the town and the lake. Zell's plush Grand Hotel is visible towering over the locomotive and first few carriages.

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5. Loco and level crossing. Our motive power was an OBB Taurus locomotive. This line also has frequent freight traffic.

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6. Typical Tyrolean winter scenery.

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7. An OBB Class 1144 waits at the head of a train of regional stock at St Johann in Tirol. 215 of these locos, which can attain 160 km/h, were built. Under Austria's 15 kV electric wires, each one is over twice as powerful as an IE 201 class diesel.

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8. Another shot of St Johann in the Alpine sun.

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9. We changed at Worgl, where the cross-country line meets the main line between Munich, Innsbruck, and northern Italy. The station has ten platforms to serve the town's 12,000 inhabitants and interchanging passengers.

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10. Our next train was EuroCity 88, the Leonardo da Vinci from Milan to Munich. This consists of carriages from Deutsche Bahn and Ferrovie dello Stato, the railway companies of Germany and Italy. A typical consist from 2006 can be found at the excellent vagonWEB site. Here's a shot of the train as it heads north towards the German border at Kufstein. [Details of carriage classifications can be found here; useful when viewing the various consists on vagonWEB]

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11. As can be see from the vagonWEB link, the train is a pretty long one. We were in the first carriage, number 266, a DB vehicle with a mixture of compartment and open seating. You can just about make out the FS carriages in the middle of the train.

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Unfortunately, due to storm-damaged OHLE, we were taken off the EuroCity service at Kufstein and herded onto a crammed ICE train for the final leg into Munich. I didn't get a chance to take any photos of this leg.

/csd