Dresden Park Railway - Miniature Railway Europe Episode 7.

Hello, thank you for joining me. I'm in the centre of Dresden in Germany. Behind me is the Frauenkirchen, the main church or the Church of Our Lady that was magnificently rebuilt after collapsing after the bombing raid. You can see on one side that's part of the original church wall that's still standing, the rest of it is rebuilt. That museum over there, that is the Transport Museum, that is worth a visit. We're not actually here to see anything in the centre of Dresden, we're going to go out to the suburbs and we're going to ride the Dresden Park Basin run, that is the miniature railway in the park. I'm on the tram now, enjoying the tram ride. I've filmed quite a few other tram routes while on this trip, so there'll be other videos on YouTube just past the big football stadium. We're going to get off the tram now and we're going to go and visit. It's a very vast park, it's so vast this railway, 15 inch gauge, so the same goes around behind the church. We're going to see a lot of the park from the miniature train. Just got off the tram over there, walking to the park, didn't take me long to find it and here we are. It's double track, 15 inch gauge, a bit like Romney Harbour and Dimchurch as I say, it's the same size but it's quite nice to find another double track 15 inch gauge. I don't think there's a double track all the way around it, there's a big loop around the park. But around the corner, just around there, is the hopper spot. So when trains come in, passengers get off on one side then they go around the loop. They don't normally let you ride around the loop, I did manage to once do it before. I came here on a visit with Rail Trail Tours and they allowed us to do it. In fact, I am here today with Rail Trail Tours on a tram tour but it's a free day or free afternoon, so I've come to have a ride on this. What I'm going to do, I'm going to line side here, see two trains here, there's a tram just to give you an idea how close we are to the tram lines, see each train here, the steam train and then a diesel, and then we'll go to the hopper and hopefully get the arrival of the steam train, get it going around the loop, so we'll see it arrive, depart, arrive and then have a ride. I've now got my ticket, it costs 8 euros, it's going to be about a 20 minute ride around the park. I hear the bells going so I think the steam train is about to arrive, so let's watch it arrive. There's our steam locomotive, Lisa, she's about to go around the loop, you see the loop goes up there, so she'll depart and come back into the station, so here's a good place to get the departure and arrival, and then it'll be time for our ride. There's a lot of these around now, especially in Central Europe, there's another one in Vienna that I've always liked, look what that's, up here, nothing is here that it can't come. Yeah so that's the depot, that's the first loop, this one here, so that forms I wonder why they stayed on, they obviously had to return from here, the people in front. The other way around, the steam coming up here would look good, it's pretty much three or four hundred years old. Yeah the sound seems around the loop. Yeah I'm going there later in the year. That'd be nice, that's another thing on my list, yeah that'd be tickets and boxes. I know it's on my list of jobs to do, yes. Behind that fence is the Dresden Zoo, and of course the first station we did pass through was called Zoo, so you can actually use the railway as well as having a nice ride around to get from A to B. I bought the eight euro ticket to do the whole thing. You can buy a five euro ticket which you can travel up to three stations, so that means you could, if you wanted to, use it. That's come to the zoo if you lived at one end of the line. I was thinking opposite where we came in, there was that big football stadium, in theory you could, if you lived down at that end, you could use this to get yourself to the football. The point is you can use it as a real railway, it's a railway that goes from somewhere to somewhere. This is the Zoo Bahnhof here. The other thing I should mention about this railway is one of the children's railways, or pioneer's railways. You may have noticed that some of the staff, I can just see the red diesel coming in, so what I should do is hang around near here, watch that go, and then the next one along will be the steam. You may have noticed some of the staff here are young adults or children, teenagers, so it's a children's railway. The most famous is probably the children's railway, but this is one of them. There's quite a few here in former East Germany. The train's coming in, I'm going to get across the crossing, I'm just going to go along the track that way so I can get a departure shot. Another interesting thing about this railway, as we've established it's effectively double track and then it runs off in a huge loop, so here we are on the northern side of the loop, but there's actually three loops. There's one just past the zoo station. Now I can kind of see that one, so I'm not so worried about that. I can see sort of the whole thing, but there was an intermediate loop, so sometimes, I don't know if it ever happens, they must run trains that only do part of the journey. So I'm following the line against the opposing trains, obviously staying well away from the track. My plan is, if I find the junction with the other loop, I can walk the other loop just to see what's there, because if I say something, I don't like to miss any bits of it, even though I appreciate I won't be doing a train. This is the main, I think this is the main sort of avenue. I can just see buses in the distance at the other end. In fact, there's trams. It's a big sort of oblong shaped park. Trams pass three sides of it. The trains will be going that way, and the railway train will be coming from that way, going in that direction. I'm going to walk up there now and go and find that junction. Here we are at one of the intermediate stations. As I was telling you, I was going to show you the junction. In fact, I can see the junction here. I'm going to take a guess that this is the Bahnhof for the palace, the railway station for the palace, because if you look, you can see the palace over there. Perhaps what we'll do is afterwards we could see if we could have a look at the palace. Here, as I say, it's a junction on the system. The line that we travelled on is this one, and this is the shorter loop, so it'll be quite fun one day. If I ever knew they were running services down the shorter loop, I'd come here just to ride the shorter loop and tick that off. Looking at it, the rails don't look particularly shiny, so I would say they probably don't use it very often. The other interesting bit of railway here is its main encounter with water. We've got a lake bridge there, and then there's a rather pleasant lake ahead of us over there. And looking back on that junction as well, I'm going to follow the line. I won't put the whole of it on camera, but I'll follow it and find anything interesting. I will show you, if not, see at the other end at the other junction. I could just about still see a train on the other line as I follow the loop line, and I think when I get to here, I've pretty much got to the junction. So it's before the loop, if you like, the loop gets wider and then gets narrower, and it's not that far up the loop, so it's actually quite a short bit of track. It's only a couple of hundred, tripping there, only a couple of hundred yards long. So we get to here, and this is the junction. You can see the point there, and the diesel train, the red diesel, that's sat in the station, so seems an obvious place to watch her go by. Here I am at one of the intermediate stations. I just had a chat with the staff, and they told me that the red diesel does a shorter trip, so it does that loop, which I didn't realise. I mean, admittedly, I haven't really looked at the leaflets to work that one out. So I'm going to watch the next two trains here, and I'm going to get on the red diesel, and I can get that back to the zoo, and then I've done that loop as well. There we are, back at the station. I have bought my ticket, so I'm going to get this to the zoo. I'm not actually going to go to the zoo and visit the animals. Charming little station there. On the last one, there were people sat next to me, so I couldn't really film so much on this side, so we kind of didn't see this station, but by doing this, we now have seen this station, and it means we're going to get to do the short trip, which I was convinced possibly didn't happen. So it's nice, they're running two services. The steam and the other diesel do the whole thing, and then this diesel, just a short trip. Let's enjoy that. Thank you. So we've arrived at the zoo. I was the only passenger on that train, and almost immediately the loco propelled the carriages into depot. So just show you what we've been doing. We started off here, I got off the tram there, the H is for Heltersteller, so we travelled all the way around here the first time, all the way around here, all the way around there. There's our loco, she's propelled her carriages. Obviously doing a bit of a shunt, you might be able to split the train in half, and they fit half in one shed, half in the other possibly. Anyway, so what we've just done is this bit of track here, so I always wanted to do that, and I'm really pleased that I've managed to do that. Perhaps my next challenge should be to try and do that loop. I'm not sure there's any more trains running or not. Yeah, that's a shorter train now, so I think the loco, yeah, they've changed the points, and it's going to propel the next set of carriages. What I'm not sure about, if that working, if this diesel's been doing the short working all day, or if that was just the last one, because some of the people who run the railway, they seem to be filming it as well, so it's almost like it was a novelty for them. So anyone from the railways watching, please do let me know, but I really have had a very enjoyable afternoon here. Just watch the loco go by. I'm going to walk back to the tram stop where we started, just because that tram's more convenient to get to the hotbar and the other diesels coming in. So I'm fairly sure that, well, they've got two steam locos. I just glimpsed one in the depot last time I came here. I think I had the other one for haulage. I believe they did have some Bressingham like this, or still have, just not running. So you see this coming in. That's EA2, I think we had EA1. Seems like an articulated unit, but this is effectively a slave unit. There's no cab in there, and that one has got passengers, so it must be going to go round again. But I think I've had my fun here this afternoon. I have got to be back at the hotel, because dinner's at seven, so we'd better not hang around here any longer. But it's been a very enjoyable afternoon. So if you are in Dresden, there's numerous other railways in Dresden as well, and it looks like they're enjoying their ride. I wonder if they know on YouTube. If you're watching, hello, and I hope you had a good day as well. Anyway, so yeah, it's been a very enjoyable afternoon here. So if you are in Dresden, do come and visit it. You can easily spend a week here. There's so many other heritage railways, narrow gauge railways, interesting tramways nearby, funiculars, Schrager, but it's literally just about everything you could want, and there are other miniature railways, bargeys and barns in the area. So hopefully in the future I'll visit some of them on this trip in the free time. This has been a Rail Trail Tours tram trip called Timeless Trams of Germany, so there'll be loads and loads of other videos on that. But I've managed to visit the Leipzig park, eyes and barn, and this one, so I've made good use of my free time, shall we say. Anyway, thank you very much for watching. Please do feel free to like, share, comment, subscribe, and from the Doubletrack mainline, I don't think we're going to see a train any time soon. Goodbye.