The BeerTrain

My first ever single manned trip to Germany, my 3rd trip overall. I had decided to avoid having to watch The Great Escape again on Xmas day or being sardined in a pub on New Years Eve. New track for diesel (in daylight) & of course winning locos being the main aim.(New locos again denoted by #.) Thursday 27/12/1990 No messing today a daytime channel crossing straight onto an overnight. 1603           Ostend - Koln             1702 Ostend - Frankfurt 350km 103 193#    Koln - Mainz              1702 Ostend - Frankfurt 185km 110 461#    Mainz - Frankfurt       1715 Amsterdam - Wien 38km Daily Total = 573km Friday 28/12/1990 103 177#    Frankfurt - Gottingen  1922 Basel - Hamburg Altona 241km A quick leap here to head back south I had a couple of diagrams to cover at Geissen. 103 190#    Gottingen - Geissen   ...

A weekend sociable trip to travel around Belgium and drink Beer, I'd always treated the country as somewhere you had to travel across to get from the Ferry to Germany, until one Sunday on the return from Germany we covered the Canoe trains out of Namur - and that was our main objective (train wise) on this trip. The participants were Myself (Poodle), Tim Reiner (Reinersaurus), Brian York (Yorkie) and Richard Stirk (Stirk). Saturday 28/05/94 You normally drank in Dover before the overnight Ferry, didn't drink on the boat as too wedged with loud normal's, then you had about 2 hours to kill in Oostende before the first Koln service at 0532. I personally walked 5 minutes or so to The Titanic, a bar with about 12 beers on tap, open 24 hours including doing food all night. It still amazes me how the bar staff in there never wrote anything down but I never saw them get an order wrong! 1503 looking rather smart at Oostend. Always a good start to get a run behind one of ...