My railway photography trips in 2019

2019 was a busy year for me. It, for starters, marked the launch of my English language travel blog (this one), and also has seen the blog decline in the number of posts. The sad reality is that I will not be able to make posts as frequently as I wanted to - but 2019 was at the same time a beautiful year with colourful trips to various locations that may be represented in upcoming posts on this blog. Altogether, partly because of my hobby, partly because of work, I have taken railway-related photos in 15 countries in Europe, which is a lot. Each country on its own is easily an adventure of weeks for a railway traveller and I could be to this many countries without being shocked by the different sensations is that this year I have only been to countries I have visited before, most of them many times already. But in those countries, there were many new locations to discover. Let's see, what my 2019 travels looked like!

2019 started by a photo charter called Fények Fotósvonata (Charter of Lights), which was an appropriate name for the night photography trip at the Királyrét Forestry Railway, a narrow-gauge railway in Hungary.

Photo of the Week: Narrow-gauge Interurban Tram in Slovakia

TREŽ (Trenčinská Električka Železnica) 411 902-0 is a ČKD-built, 76 cm gauge railcar that operates on the interurban tram line between Trenčianká Teplá railway station on the Bratislava-Žilina-Košice mainline and Trenčianske Teplice, a renown bath resort. The line mostly runs next to the road or on the embankment of the creek and passes by scenes of different character: village, hilly countryside, Socialist-era blocks of flats and townhouses dating back to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Trains only operate on selected weekend and are ran by the association TREŽ. The photo was taken during a photo charter at Trenčianske Teplice zastávka.
Learn more about the railway from my recent travelogue about narrow-gauge trams in Slovakia.

Tram 38 of Bytom

Okay, this should be a railway-related blog, but this is also a personal one, and this one was a personal interest for me, so here it comes. The Upper Silesian Interurbans may be something an enthusiast is familiar with, but do not be sad if you are not - people only get addicted to its intriguing story and unbelievable existence when they hear about it, but since it is an undisclosed secret of Poland, it is not easy to hear about it.

Poland had a complicated history, in some eras, the neighbouring nations simply split up its territory, so at the beginning of the 19th century Poland simply didn't exist: at the current area of Poland, Russia, the Habsburg Empire and Prussia has expanded its borders. Silesia had been a Prussian territory and the Germans made use of the coal to be found deep in this area, bringing economic growth to Silesia.