Riding the Death Railway

The above video shows a day excursion on the Thai-Burma railroad. These excursions, which operate on the weekends and holidays, run north-west from Bangkok to several towns and sites. The Thai-Burma railway is commonly called the Death Railway because of the number of POWs and forced laborers who died constructing it in WWII. On it is the famous Bridge over the River Kwai, which I've recently discussed in the post The Bridge on the River Kwai, and is one of the stops on this trip (they also cross the bridge).   

Regular readers may recall that this rail line appeared in one of my posts during my recapping of the Thai TV show O-Negative. During a school break the kids went to Kanchanaburi, which is one of the stops in the above video. The train car they're in looks a lot like, although it isn't identical, the 3rd class car the creator of the above video rides.

In the video he mentions another video he did about the market train. I've included it below. It is a train that runs through a market. The vendors need to pull back their goods and fold their awnings as it approaches. It is quite amazing; in the U.S. it would be about a bazillion lawsuits in the offing. Curiously, I've previously used a video of the same train, but filmed from ground level. It was in my very first Cryptic post called Life goes on.   

Paintings of trains

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These images, and those after the jump, are paintings of trains, train yards and train stations. They primarily feature steam locomotives. In their day they were astonishing pieces of technology. We forget that for most of human history you had to walk, or at best ride a horse, to travel anywhere overland. The took a long time and trains were the first vehicles that greatly shrunk the time between two points. 

Today if we talk about trains at all it is the fetishists of high-speed rail. High-speed rail is used to move people, but in the U.S. we use our rail network to move freight, and so there is little real interest in high-speed trains. 

Do trains and soccer mix?

Above is a video of two steam powered trains driving through the soccer field (only stupid furriners call it football) of the amateur soccer team in Jánošovka, Slovakia. That's the home field of the local team, TJ Tatran Čierny Balog. The train tracks run between the field and the grandstands. As you can see, the game continues as the trains chug past the match. 

You may think it's odd, but, as I've mentioned before, one of my ancestral homelands is Slovakia so it all seems perfectly normal to me. 

Edit to add -- the video below is longer and shows more of the route, but you need to go to YouTube to watch it.

Overland trains

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Before cargo hauling helicopters became viable for the job, delivering freight to remote location was a problem. In the mid 20th century one attempted solution was overland trains (also called land or road trains). They featured powerful engines that pulled a string of trailers, which themselves were often motorized and had steering, and could operate on poor roads, snow and cross-country.

Railplanes

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In the development of railroads aircraft engines and propellers, and eventually even jet engines, were explored as means of propulsion. First tired in Russia with the Aerowagon in 1917, variations on the concept were imagined, prototyped and put into limited use through out the 20th century.

These are images of those trains. At the end of this post, after the jump, is a video of the Bennie Railplane in action. 

An afternoon's work on the rails

Jaw Tooth is a train enthusiast who has posted a number of videos to YouTube. This one starts with the train engine parked near a Mr. Frosty for lunch. They then switch some cars and in one section of the video they drive on a track that  runs down the middle of a street. Odd to see a train moving through a mixed business and residential district in a small Ohio town.

Riding on neglected rails

Above is a video of a train crawling along a poorly maintained stretch of track. That got me wondering, especially with legislation about infrastructure repair on the horizon, what is the ownership of railroad tracks -- public or private?

It turns out railroad tracks are privately owned. I guess the whole issue of land grants to RR companies back in the 19th century should have been a clue to me about that fact. Regardless, the laws surrounding RR tracks must be complex. I suppose trains from other companies must have to lease time to travel on tracks, and who knows how RR right-of-ways impact local zoning, etc.

It seems like a railroad would be a utility, but I guess they are something different.

This section of neglected railroad track is owned by Pioneer RailCorp. They bought it from Maumee and Western Railroad and, from the comment accompanying the video, Pioneer had upgraded most of the rest of the track they had bought from Maumee and Western. This little section sure looks harrowing to run on.
 

Riding the rails

Take a trip on an English private railroad. The description says it is the "largest ...  railway of its size" which seems like an odd wording. Could referring to myself as the "largest person of my size" make any sense?

Anyway, that quibble aside, it is an amazing toy. Chugging around on it looks like a hoot and the grounds are quite beautiful.

When tornado and train intersect

The first minute of the video is mundane, but then the wind comes.