The BeerTrain

A trip to celebrate Simon Brazels birthday - his Fiftieth. A large drinking party of the 3 Brazels Simon, Sean & David, with at least Trog, Betty, Howey (armed with an advance copy of Neath's Good Beer Guide Germany) & myself. Not for the feint hearted! (New locos again denoted by #). Thursday 18/05/2006 I actually flew to Linz as required track had appeared as the Krems - Linz now ran direct instead of via St.Valentin. 1144 270#  Hörsching - Linz       1559 Attnang Pucheim - Linz 10km Unit            Linz - Grein Stadt     1706 Linz - St Nikola Studen 62km 2043 016    Grein Stadt - Linz     1701 Krems - Linz 62km Quite a few hours here I wonder what I did - of course Beers (& a little food) in the brewpub! 101 090#    Linz - München Ost  2030 Budapest - München 280km Daily Total = 414km Friday 19/05/2006 A whole morning in Munchen to kill - Rabbits! Increase my Kliks with hopefully a few new.... 218 400    München - Dorfen                   0619 München - Mühldorf 47km

From my early years Bashing Crompton's on the Pompey's I had made a number of good friends, many of whom still remain as such today. Indeed most are now part of the 33/1 Preservation Group, which me & Peckham jointly called the first meeting of in 1988, to see if there was enough interest to take up the reigns from the BRCW group which had recently started to go the wrong way. Several people, not living in the South-East, came down to bash every school holiday or end of college term. One of these was Andrew Dzikowskyj, from Edinburgh, who was more normally known as TZ - as most couldn't pronounce his name! He had long told me that he would form a 6LDA (or Class 26) Preservation Group. The 6LDA Group was formed by TZ in 1991 with the aim of preserving a Class 26. I was one of the 1st shareholders in the group, if only amounting to TWO shares after a cancelled 26 tour I had booked on, the money refunded from which I put into the new group. I couldn't really invest mor

I was sat at home one evening, after work at the Smeed Dean Brickworks in Sittingbourne, watching ANOTHER re-run of an original Star Trek episode while my Mum got on with her ironing (I say her ironing as no-one else was going to do it!) when the house phone rang. "Hello it's Eric Tyler from Templecombe station, we've already got enough bookings for the Crompton Farewell train on October 22nd to more than half fill another train. What do you think?" What I immediately thought was how did he get my number, I don't work for the railway & my booking for the Farewell was as part of a block booking made by someone else?! Anyway my obvious reply was to suggest running a 2nd train the following Saturday - after all that's double mileage for all of us! "How can we guarantee that we don't get the same locos both weeks, or make it so people want to do a 2nd trip?" Eric & Gerald Daniels (Salisbury Area Manager) were  responsible for planning these t

A single manned trip to DB land, main aim of this trip to get to Berlin behind a pair of 218's. As usual # denotes new loco. The overnight ferry, now departing from Ramsgate, was as usual the booked outward move, with probably a couple of beers in the Titanic bar in Ostend before sleeping my way across Belgium. Saturday 03/02/96 2728            Oostende - Aachen 0634  Oostende -  Köln 280km 110 263#  Aachen -  Köln   0634  Oostende -  Köln 70km Only one piece of new track to aim at today, so mainly a case of working my way south towards my overnight, covering as many diesel diagrams on the way as possible. 218 130    Köln - K öln Hansaring 0940 Gummersbach - K.Hansaring 1km 143 258#  K öln Hansaring -  K öln 1050  K öln Hansaring - Au 1km 215 038#  K öln - Euskirchen 1114  K öln Deutz - Trier 40km 215 094# Euskirchen - Bonn 1159  Euskirchen - Bonn 34km Time to drop further down the Rhine & cover the diagrams on the Kreuzberg & Emmelshausen branches. 110 419   Bonn - Remagen

Not a pure Crank trip this time, more something I managed to persuade the wife she really wanted to do on the way back from a Holiday in Italy! We'd rented an apartment overlooking Lake Como in Menaggio, a very well to do resort town. View from our Menaggio Apartment View of Menaggio taken from the Lake View of the Lake taken from Menaggio As usual with these types of places pretty poor for me in respect of Brewpubs and interesting beers, apart from a good shop that did sell rarities from small breweries in the local area. This meant if we weren't in town of an evening for a meal then I was more than happy to sit on our balcony & sample some of these! We hired a car for the week, good fun down some of the Lakes VERY narrow roads some of which were single track with blind bends in the middle! I drove past George Clooney's house several times but he never popped out to wave, he's been known to have a few beers in Menaggio oft times but he was a no-show this week! I wo