...What am I doing
to pass the time? Well, I’m touring the world – virtually –
from the cab of trains. There are many, many ways of wasting time,
and I suppose watching videos taken from the driver’s cab of trains
on YouTube is one rather strange way. But I think it is better than
playing solitaire on the computer. That, at any rate, is my story,
and I’m sticking with it.
I’ve only
discovered the joys of train driving, oh, about three months ago or
so. And yet, I can’t remember how I came to discover the addictive
joy of watching the countryside – or the embankments, trees, or
tunnels, flow by. I think I watched a video on British steam trains,
and that led to another, and eventually to train rides across Great
Britain. You might be amazed at how many such rides have been
recorded, and in these days, in 4K by GoPro cameras.
As I said, it is
strangely addictive – the rails always stretching on ahead, and you
never know what the next bend will reveal. I’ve also be come quite
the expert at reading the signals that control the trains that run so
frequently.
As I said, I started
in Britain, and below is the map of the British Rail System, with the
routes in yellow being the ones that I have traveled in the driver’s
cab. I have to say that some parts of England are rather murky… But
perhaps that is due to the age of the video and the cameras used…
I think that I may
have traveled every route currently available to be viewed. But you
never know what might turn up on my YouTube home page..
If you are
interested in seeing Britain by train, the YouTube channel to start
with is Don Coffey’s:
There are others
that cover more than the English midlands, but his are high quality
and include a lot of interesting information on the Victorian
Engineering that went into making the British rail system, and how it
works.
After covering all
of Britain that I could, I moved on to Switzerland. As you can see
from the map below, I’ve seen a lot of Switzerland. Even without
taking into account the Alps, Switzerland and its rail system is very
different than Britain’s. It is a much smaller system, and without
all the Victorian era overhead that British rail has to deal with, it
seems a much more modern system. And some of the videos of trains in
the Alps are breathtaking, even if you’re not addicted to cab ride
videos.
There are two very
good, high quality sources for cab ride videos through Switzerland:
I highly recommend
both of them.
I did ride on
several French and German high speed trains and one Swedish train.
There do not seem to be many German train rides*, but I will have to
return to France some day.
*Update: I have found a really nice channel of lots of cab rides through Germany, here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/747AnanasBoeing747/videos
*Update: I have found a really nice channel of lots of cab rides through Germany, here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/747AnanasBoeing747/videos
There are a lot of cab ride videos on
Norwegian trains, which you can find here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/HinduCowGirl/videos
I have only briefly
sampled one. The reason I have not explored Norway more is that because of all the mountains,
there are many, many, tunnels needed to run trains through that
breathtaking countryside. At least that was my impression based on my one trip that there. It seemed that there were more tunnels than breathtaking views. (Tunnels are pretty boring.) I’ll have to return some
day to see it that is true on all the trips.
Anyway, now I’ve
move on to a very different country: Japan. Japan has plenty of
mountains and breathtaking views, but it is also very different as
well. At least in the south of Japan, you are rarely out of a
city/town/village unless you are in some narrow mountain pass. It is
interesting to see all the cultural differences between these countries
that you can note even from the front window of a train.
I’m
currently exploring the videos from these channels:
I have a lot of places yet to visit,
as you can see from my map below. Many of them are on slow commuter trains, but you get to enjoy the cherry blossoms that abound in the spring. I don't think there are any videos from the cabs of Japan's highspeed trains, but I have a feeling they's be pretty boring, as they generally run straight -- through hills and over valleys and have walls on each side. Luckily I can cut and paste the
Japanese descriptions into Google Translate to get an idea of where
I’m going.
