Kandersteg

I've now got the ten rolls of film from Switzerland back, all scanned onto CDRoms; time to put a few of them up on the web. These are from my first day there, taken in and around Kandersteg, a holiday resort at the top of the Kandertal, and the top of the north ramp of the Lötchberg railway. A mile south of Kandersteg station the line plunges into the 9 mile Lötchberg tunnel, to emerge south of the Bernese Oberland into canton Wallis.

An SBB Re460 heads one of the hourly Basel-Brig Inter City trains out of Kandersteg, formed of a push-pull set of EWiv coaches, with an ex-SNCF "Corail" baggage car behind the locomotive.

The Re460s are the most modern locomotives in the SBB fleet. They dominate inter-city and international passenger trains throughout the country, and also haul a high percentage of freight trains over the steep trans-alpine routes. The stylish design is the work of Italian designer Pininfarina.

A northbound Inter-City bound for Basel, with the driving trailer in the lead. I find these trains less photogenic from this end; there's something about having a proper locomotive at the head of the train.

The BLS has it's own variant of the Re460, the Re465. While identical in appearance, apart from the livery, there are some technical differences, one of which is the ability to work in multiple with older locomotives, something the 460s cannot do. This one, like many locomotives of both the BLS and SBB, wears an advertising livery, in this case advertising Valais Tourism.

One of the older BLS Re4/4s heads a car shuttle into Kandersteg. These trains carry cars (and their drivers) through the tunnel between Kandersteg and Goppenstein, a route with no parallel road link. Unlike the fully enclosed trains used on Eurotunnel, these trains are simply flat wagons with open sides.

The long distance EC Vauban rolls into Kandersteg station, in the later stages of it's lenghty run from Brussels to Milan. Hauled again by one of the near-ubiquitous SBB Re460s, the coaching stock is one of the most heterogenious formations I've seen. The international portion is made up of five coaches of the SNCB, Belgian State Railways. Three of them are new I11 stock (2nd, 4th and 5th in the train), with two older Eurofima coaches, one of which still wears the obsolete orange livery dating from when it was new. The SBB portion at the back of the train is a ragbag of older stock, mostly elderly EW1s with one rebuilt 1960s UIC car.

This is one train I can't reproduce in model form, since no-one makes models of the Belgian I11s, and my scratchbuilding skills don't extend as far as making my own.

The same train departing for the heart of the mountains, next stop Goppenstein at the other end of the tunnel.