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May - Sleeping Across the Continent

Having wetted our appetites for 'travelling by train' (back to our Inter-Rail days), we repeated the exercise with a trip to Prague on Phil's birthday: Eurostar from Waterloo to Brussels, Around Brussels and the TinTin

Museum / Gallery before a late night sleeper to Berlin. Sunday morning was spent around Berlin's new Hauptbahnhof, Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenberg Gate, the edge of the Airlift airfield and then lunch at Spandau (no Ballet) before taking the afternoon train to Prague - arriving in the evening.

The weather was glorious for 2 days of sightseeing in which we had a vintage Skoda car ride up to the Palace and a river Trip. We departed by Sleeper bound for Frankfurt, arriving at breakfast time, then a swift and spacious ICE3 run to Köln and a wet day visiting model shops before taking a more cramped Thalys2 to Brussels Midi for the last Eurostar of the day back to Waterloo, and home by midnight: Cinderella style!

Summer - Trains, Ferries and Hotels too! Damph and Damp

In the summer we took the Channel Tunnel for a 'lightweight' disco trip to Sweden - no top box, small tent and more fuel economy, heading for southern Sweden. A stop at Miniatur Wunderland [www.miwula.de] in Hamburg to see the new 'Alps' section under construction then on via the Puttgarten ferry to Denmark.

A trip on the Maribo-Bandholm railway (diesel hauled), then on to a campsite at Koge, just south of Kopenhagen, for a vintage railbus ride. Rain: Our tent remained dry inside, but others were flooded out.

Having left the UK just before the final Harry Potter book was released, we stopped to buy a copy ( in English ) before heading across the Øresund Bridge to Sweden, Eurohobby at Helsingborg, and our usual campsite at Ivö ( an inland island on Ivösjön, between Kritianstad and Bromolla ). Sadly the weather was not warm enough for swimming this year. We visited the Skanska Jarnvag at Brosarp, and rode the now extended industrial narrow gauge line from Ohs Bruk to Bor mainline station, before a brief visit to Göteborg ( Ulf&Gunilla & HobbyCenter & LMMJ again ). Back east to the kingdom of glass, and another favourite campsite at Växjö from where we toured the glass-works, then a trip on the Hultsfred-Vastervik
narrow gauge railway ( the last few kilometres of which are mixed gauge sharing the track with SJ ) line into Vastervik). Riding again in Phil's favourite style of railbus.

The Narrow Gauge Lines of the North German Coast: Bergen 2

Missing the relaxation of a long ferry journey, we changed direction, and took a ferry south from Trelleborg to Sassnitz on the island of Rügen in northern Germany. Rügen is a seaside resort with extensive countryside, cyclepaths, and the home of the originals of many of LGB's Narrow Gauge locos. We stayed in a small 'Romantik' Hotel in Bergen auf Rügen, where we realised that our German was far more rusty

than our Swedish!. We rode behind a 2-10-2T from Putbus to Sellin. Travelling generally westward, we visited a number of model shops, and a further narrow gauge steam train at the Molli (Bad-Doberan - Kühlungsborn); travelling through the streets, to the coast this is a Bäderbahn. [www.molli-bahn.de]

Heading west once more, and passing Hamburg in the pouring rain, we arrived at a large campsite on the Baltic coast at Norden, here the weather improved, and the sun shone, as we took a ferry ride out to Langeoog, a car-free island with its own narrow gauge railway which takes luggage and bikes in containers directly from the ferry! Then it was back through Northern Holland and, passing Hoek of Holland, south to Calais and home through the Channel Tunnel (to be greeted by crawling Traffic on the M25 to the M23!).