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After ten years a return to the Gotthard Pass was long overdue. The Gotthard is one of Europe’s busiest freight routes, carrying heavy traffic between Germany and Italy through the heart of the Swiss Alps. While in Switzerland, I also followed a tip off that there were some worthwhile photo positions around Frick on the Basel - Zürich line and had a look at the MGB’s metre gauge line around Andermatt and the Oberalp Pass.

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It was time to try to fill some of the gaps in my electric coverage. Usti nad Labem is a busy centre for freight and passenger traffic, with a good variety of loco classes and types of traffic and some excellent photo locations nearby. I spent four days there but my plans were scuppered by the weather and I spent most of the time exploring. As a result, this report is more of a description of the lines ridden than of the photographic locations visited.

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My last visit to the Westbahn, the main line east of Salzburg, was almost 10 years ago, when class 1142s and 1144s predominated and class 1010s and 1110s were still fairly common on freights. Things are very different today, in the era of Taurii and Railjets, but there are still plenty of loco hauled passengers and quite a few freights, even on a Sunday. This report details a day trip to the line during my April 2010 visit to southern Germany.

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Although I’d done a few trips to Germany in recent years, there were many lines and locations I hadn’t visited. This trip was designed to fill in some of the gaps and covered mainly new territory with visits to see electrics on the Gäubahn (Stuttgart - Singen) and Altmühltal (Ingolstadt - Treuchtlingen) and diesel freights around Mühldorf. I also managed a day on the electrified München - Salzburg line.

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This report describes a couple of short visits to the Strasbourg - Sarrebourg line, a busy and scenic, double-track, electrified route through the Vosges in eastern France. The line forms part of the Luxembourg - Strasbourg - Basel and Paris - Strasbourg - Stuttgart axes and carries a wide variety of traffic including TGVs, loco hauled passengers, EMUs and heavy freights.

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A visit to two of the best remaining steam-worked industrial systems in China. The coal mines around Jixi in the north-east still employ around 20 SY class 2-8-2s on an extensive network of railways running through a mixture of impressive industrial architecture and pleasant countryside. Much further west, at Baiyin, another fleet of SYs serves a complex of ore smelters in the desert. Both operations are threatened with modernisation in the near future and the first diesels had already arrived at Baiyin by the time of our visit.

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This report covers two trips to the Rhätischebahn in January 2010. The first of a large fleet of new EMUs has just entered traffic and the next couple of years will see big changes to the current fleet of locos and motor-coaches. This was probably the last chance to photograph a full winter service with the 60 year old class Ge4/4i locos playing a full part. The weather had other ideas though.

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The days when steam locomotives were easy to find are long gone and the best locations are often far from each other. On this trip we set out to visit two of the furthest apart, the opencast coal mine at Sandaoling in the north-western province of Xinjiang and the narrow gauge coal railway at Huanan in eastern Heilongjiang. These are two very different operations yet they share some common features beyond the fact that they both haul coal, most notably the use of banking engines.

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An autumn trip to the Rhätischebahn, in south-eastern Switzerland. The trip turned out a little differently to what was expected due to bad weather. Despite the problems, there was still plenty to photograph in the beautiful Graubünden landscape, including the Berninabahn in its last autumn before the arrival of new EMUs and the veteran class Ge4/4i electrics, some of which are over 60 years old.

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Three lines converge on Volary, a small town in the heart of the Sumava, the mountainous region in the south-west of the Czech Republic that borders Germany and Austria. There are a couple of freights that run all year round and, in summer, when tourists flock to the area, there are a few loco hauled passengers as well. Volary had been on my list of places to visit for a long time and I finally got round to going there from 5 to 9 August 2009.

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