Tag: train

52Frames – 2022-36 to -38

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2022-36 – Golden Hour

A Casio watch on a white background, showing a long shadow on its right.

The theme for week 36 was “Golden Hour”, with an extra credit for “Indoor Studio Lighting”. Which was pretty good, because I shot this at a very late hour on Sunday evening 😉 I tried to reproduce the idea of golden hour with long, soft shadows and a yellower tint than I would typically use. This was a very lazy shot, but it did the job. Sad I don’t have a golden-colored watch – it would have been a better pun!

2022-37 – Portrait of a Stranger

A train attendant standing in front of the open door of an older train. The train beige, blue and golden; the letters BUDAPEST are visible on its side.

The “Portrait of a Stranger” theme is a common one on 52Frames, and probably the one where I’m the most likely to break my streak when it happens on a given year (we got a two-year reprieve in the previous years 😉 ), and I was fully prepared to “cheat” (I’ve done that before!). But, we went to the Hauptbahnhof on that Saturday, and that train just arrived on the track where we surfaced from the underground tunnels. Kismet it was – I took some pictures of the train, and decided to submit this one for that week.

52Frames – 2022-38 – One Light Source

A purple origami lotus flower on a white background, with a visible soft shadow on the side.

Another lightbox/studio shot for the “One Light Source” theme – but this time I took the time to refresh my paper background (compare with the first picture – it’s much better 😉 I did a bit of origami last week, and learnt that delightful lotus fold; I plopped it in my lightbox and played with a Lume cube until I was happy with the shadow, which I wanted soft, but visible.

Chemins de fer du Kaeserberg

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A week ago, we went to Fribourg, and more precisely to Granges-Paccot, to visit the Chemins de fer du Kaeserberg – a very impressive model railway exhibition.

The visit starts with a short movie that explains the origins of the project and gives a bit of technical background. I was fascinated by the work on the dioramas… and by the existence of a railroad-cleaning train 🙂

After the movie, we arrive in front of the first “station” that stores the trains that can travel on the rail network on that day – they say that they have 87 trains that are ready to travel.

The trains travel to the “main” circuit a couple of meters above via an helicoidal ramp, that is unfortunately not visible from the outside. There’s a hidden station to buffer trains before they actually arrive in the publicly visible area.

There are three networks in the model, all at 1:87 scale, but with two different track widths (H0 and H0m), corresponding to “standard” gauge and “narrow/metre” gauge.

Every half hour, night falls, giving a whole other atmosphere to the model.

They’re still working on a second line for the Kaeserberg train – it’s pretty neat to see the work in progress!

And finally, obviously, a Pierre for scale:

The full album with a few more pictures is here: Chemins de fer du Kaeserberg.

If you enjoy model trains and/or geeky stuff in general, I can highly recommend the visit. But beware: I found myself becoming far more enthusiastic about model trains after the visit than before 😉 Also, they have specific opening days, and it’s advised to make reservations for the tour.