You've probably seen the photos Torsten and myself have uploaded of the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn, a top suspended monorail that is a unique symbol for its city. My little tour there today didn't produce any outstanding pics (by my standards) but I did record a little video. Yes, the only device capable of video recording that I have is in fact my crappy old compact camera, but it still conveys the feeling of floating along over the streets and the river Wupper. I added some annotations as subtitles as well.

Video Link

So much stuff happened, and so little time to write about it… I’m actually sitting in our university’s computer lab, waiting for someone to come by and examine my Mathematica program. Hopefully one of the nicer examiners, not that guy who asks all sorts of crap you don’t know and don’t need to know to have solved the task.

First and foremost, thanks very much for the birthday wishes and the awesome gifts, I shall feature them all at the end of this journal! Again, sorry that I’m a bit late, but the weekend was spent having fun, and yesterday was spent doing the papers I’d normally do during the weekend.

So, what happened on the weekend? Well, there was the Müngstener Brückenfest which I already mentioned, and of which I uploaded one photo until now. That pic became my most faved deviation overnight, which kind of flattered me. I did think that it looked good, but I never thought that it would become that popular. Thanks to everyone who faved it (almost 100 users), I might not get around to thanking everyone in person.

The photo was taken on Saturday, and on Sunday, I met up with Torsten to take even more photos, to test drive my new 55-250mm tele lens, and to ride the very train from the said photo. You might have seen the Top Gear Botswana special, with Jeremy exclaiming “Why don’t all cars have no doors?!”. In the same manner, I had to ask “Why aren’t all trains pulled by steamers and composed of noisy old two axle carriages?!”. It was very awesome to say the least, and you felt like a rock star because there were people all along the tracks, on bridges, on platforms, and sadly, some also trespassing in a rather obvious manner. But we didn’t let that spoil our fun and took turns leaning out the window, shooting pics, despite the “Nicht hinauslehnen!” signs. Of course, I caught a lot of soot with my face and hair, but that’s part of the fun. Still, I should take some form of protective eyewear with me next time, as my eyes tend to close out of reflex when they get stuff in them. And I can’t really take pics without seeing what I’m shooting, or more importantly, keeping track of the vegetation ahead before it slaps me in the face. Luckily, I had a cheap filter on my tele, so it remained unaffected from all the soot.

In other news, I was also at a restaurant with some of my friends from university on Saturday, enjoying an all you can eat meal. Or rather enjoying it until my stomach started hurting. On Sunday, I was at my favourite Steakhouse with my mom, because steaks are the most refined form of meat one can eat. With fried onions and a corn cob, just heavenly I tell you, accompanied by an excellent vintage of Coca Cola. Heh, I also received a very awesome gift from a few closer friends from university, namely an electric fly swatter! It’s probably the most advanced piece of technology humankind has ever thought of. A charged metallic grid that fries all sorts of insects with a loud crack and a flash. If you can’t imagine the carnage, here’s a video of me killing a ladybug, which kept annoying me for days, buzzing about and then hiding in the light cover for the next few hours. [link]

UPDATE: We did get the asshole examiner, but he was so fed up with so many people that need to get their programs looked at that we got through without any problem. And now, on to the birthday feature!

In order of appearance, or rather uploading:

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He asked me what I wanted, and my favourite British loco is of course the tractor. Tractor I wanted, tractor I got, and the description with "fresh off a night shift at work, with extremely bleary eyes and a questionable state of mind" made it all more heroic and epic! Thanks very much!

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Ah, a class 87, how fitting for someone who was born in 1987. As Rob said, it is a rather rare and cool class, moved to European countries for use. He thought it would be very fitting, and I have to agree.

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Heh, a gift from a fellow Hungarian! I haven't even properly been to the railway station this was shot at, just to the tram terminus near it. What we have here is a Stadler Flirt EMU, or as the Hungarians would say, Flört.

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We all know steamers are epic by now, I've seen it with my own eyes! This one is no different, I especially like the effect long exposures have on steam.

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My favourite engine that is still in use, the Bügelfalte class 110 of course. What I like about this one is the fact that I once shot this engine in Leverkusen: [link]

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While it is not immediately clear what class this is (and me not being too familiar with British engine classes anyways), it is still a rather awesome shot from times passed. 1967, that was "only" 20 years before I was born.

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And another 110, this time from Hoyt. And again, I'm happy to report that I had the very same loco in front of my lens once [link] and to make it even better, I shot her even before she received this new look [link] Despite it being rather dark, it is very moody as well, and as Eric said it, the cheerful colours of it are rather appropriate for the occasion.

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Yes, I admit, I fell in love with 143s lately. Someone seemed to have noticed. The oldschool "Silberling" coaches instead of the S-Bahn carriages I usually catch them with are of course an extra bonus to this.


Thanks very much for all of you, I believe this birthday was among the very awesome ones. Today was of course not that good with usualy university stuff having to be done, but the weekend was filled with epic steam trains, a new tele lens and a new most faved deviation. Finding all these happy birthday pics made this day awesome as well.

You're a great bunch of crazy railfans!

I'm totally sane of course... Yeah. Oh wait, I'm a physics student, and a railfan. No, scrap that sanity part. And now, I'm off to the cafeteria!

Finally, I went through all of the users I watch and unwatched a royal trainload of them, while organizing everyone I kept into the categories I sorta neglected in the past. If you read this, you're most certainly not among the unwatched. In all honesty, I don't know why I was watching so many people in the first place, but I did apparently, with my inbox being overly full in a matter of hours. That's something I wanted to avoid, as deviations of people whose work I really like often got lost in the lot. This way, I can concentrate on pics I really like and those from which I can learn something myself. Heh, though I still haven't reached the point of being able to tell how popular a picture will be, still fearing that some photos will be ignored for being too boring (and then they are quite popular) or thinking it's a nice shot (which turns out to be less popular).

Anyways, I still have to work on getting that one right, and on overcoming this fear that a shot will be unpopular. Instead, I should of course just upload it and let the audience decide, but I want to refrain from uploading too much stuff at once (hence my links to DSO, for easy scrolling-along tours). At least I thought that this measure would be a good idea to avoid uploading many similar railroad shots, while still allowing those who are interested in them to see them two clicks further.

While looking through the list of deviants, I also noticed two names, ~kisPalika and =TomPix, two great deviants that just sorta disappeared without a word. Tom's account is still there, with all pics and even a subscription, while Palika decided to delete everything. I'm quite saddened by this, as I haven't saved any of his photos, even though I featured them several times in my journals. The way he played around with the low, setting sun for lighting was just superb, everything was so moody, so fitting, with that typical middle of nowhere feeling of Hungarian branchlines. Just gone. Tom seems to have departed as well, and I hope nothing happened to him that made his activities cease all of a sudden. From some of his journals, one could deduce that he was suffering from depressions or similar problems that he didn't give further details about, so I hope for the best. He really inspired me with his extremely crisp photos, good usee of tele perspectives and a rather agressive way of cropping. Quite often, I think "Damn, I bet Tom would like this one!" when shooting an engine type he liked in the way I saw him do it. Not to mention the fact that he was one of the few German railfans here on DA.

I hope you guys and gals are all here to stay!

Forget everything I said in my previous entry. I'm back to grabbing my camera whenever there's something remotely interesting, which boiled down to almost 400 pics for today. I made a post on DSO as usual, so if you're interested, check out the link below. One photo isn't working, and my webspace isn't responding, so please bear with me on that one. Oh, about the title, I attended a string theory course today, with which I hope to improve my overall grade, should I be able to complete it successfully. And the Calabi-Yau manifold was mentioned at one point, which must be awesome, since it's even mentioned in Half-Life 2! Cool huh?

Here are the photos: [link]

The comments are in German of course, so ask away if you don't understand something. The train towards the middle of the photos is a "Schadzug", containing a very mixed assortment of rolling stock that has to be repaired/overhauled or was just repaired/overhauled. Among the freshly renovated coaches, there were four electrics, two non-Bügelfalte 110s, a 101 and a 120 at the end. What I liked the most was the very nice light, making for great contrasts. Yes, some are overexposed, but those fall into the "interesting rolling stock" rather than "good photo" category.

As university will probably kick back in properly in the following week, I'll have considerably less time for DA than I had until now, so my comment answers and deviation comments might be delayed ever so slightly. Since I really liked some of the shots from today, I'm going to touch some of them up and put them up here at the rate of one or two pics a day or so, if that's all right with all of you. If you like one pic in particular, please tell me, and I'll be sure to include that one as well.

Also quite funny: There were five other railfans at the scene, so we shot some of the stuff I put up together. At one point, namely when we were taking photos of 115 509, one guy asked the driver whether he could take some cab shots. Being very kind, the driver (an elderly gentleman) had no problem with that and even took the coffee mugs off the dash for the photo. At the end, he even allowed the railfan to rattle up the notches while the direction selector was on 0, or to manually turn on the cooling fans etc. When he stumbled out of the cab with that happy grin, the others joked "And? Pants still dry?".



Having been inside numerous 110 cabs at the Bender, my pants were of course not endangered. Still, it was a very nice, albeit chilly day, with great lighting and an abundance or trains. And I mean real trains, with engines, not those EMUs! Gotta love engines, especially good old Bügelfalte 110s or the bright red 143s.

German Unification Day

The actual fall of the Berlin Wall took place on the 9th of Novenber 1989, but that was also the date of Hitler's failed coup in 1923 and the Novemberpogrom of 1938, so the third of October was chosen instead.

A little known fact: It was actually Hungary that brough along the final collapse of the iron curtain, by symbolically cutting the barbed wire fence at the Austrian border and opening the gates on the 27th of June, 1989. As people from socialist countries were allowed to travel to other socialist countries, they could make their way into the West through Hungary, punching a hole in the until then almost imperemable and deadly border that cut through Europe for almost half a century.


As you may have noticed, I'm still rather inactive, with maths and quantum mechanics exams still having to be written next week. Nevertheless, I had some nice rig-building shots from yesterday that I put up for your enjoyment.