Travelling from Freiburg to visit the family in Stuttgart this week, I found myself with an hour spare in Karlsruhe. It turns out this is a great place to have a bike and a camera, because it is a meeting point of several lines running from places like the Rhineland, and Rotterdam in the north, to Switzerland and Italy in the south, and also the lines from Austria and Munich to France (and ultimately the UK) running east-west. There's a number of freight yards all around the region and one is a few minutes cycling from the main railway station.
First thing to pass was this Swiss railways class 421, looking surprisingly good in modern livery for a loco built at least three decades ago. The advertising reads "Zürich - Munich 6x daily in 3.5 hours" which I'm assuming means trains rather than just this locomotive rattling back and forth. Also, if it is going from Munich to Zürich then it's a bit lost.
Loco stabling point with a stack of DB class 185 locomotives, SBB Vectron on the front of an intermodal train in the main yards, and another SBB Class 185 sneaking around the back of the signal box.
That turned out to be a Chemical train running across the yard on its way south.
On the way back into the city I was able to find a couple of the Karlsruhe "tram trains" in the city. I always felt the older units looked a bit dated, but the new ones are an improvement.
Outside the main station. These are the same as the new tram-train units on Sheffield.
Now I've explored a bit I know where to go next time, and as I don't want to spoil things by mentioning that I was pootling about Karlsruhe for an hour because the DB train from the south had been late and made me miss my connection, again, I'll keep quiet about that...
