Train of the Week

Well I was going to finally write one about the TGV, or in English, the High Speed Train of France. But I went into the bush and camped all week so I hadn't any time to really get around to doing a good job. However, I've found myself this really well done HD video on YouTube of the trains that are running on the South-east High Speed Line, or en français, Ligne à Grande Vitesse Sud-Est, connecting Paris and Lyon. Enjoy. Next week, there will be some boring text.

Well I'll continue to ease into the TGV post by writing about another export model here. This time we shift our attention to Spain, a country currently having the second largest high speed rail network in the world. The high speed service in Spain, operated by state owned Renfe, is operated under the name AVE, Alta Velocidad Española, or Spanish High Speed. The AVE S-100 looks slightly more rounded than the TGV  The S-100 is the first true high speed train in Spain. The trainset was derived from the TGV Atlantique articulated push-pull trainset (unlike the Réseau or KTX, which the truck immediately behind the power car was powered as well). The first 8 of the 16 sets ordered were built by Alstom in France and the rest by CAF in Spain. Definitely looks a lot shorter than the KTX-I Unlike the KTX-I or TGV-K mentioned last week, the AVE S-100 came in a more standard 8-car consist featuring the TGV's signature articulating Jacobs trucks. First introduced in 1992,...

I realise that although this is a train blog, I have never written a single post on the famous high speed trains of France. Part of it is because I'm unsure if the literary skills and attention I'll be able to expend on these world famous trainsets will do them justice. So I'm thinking to get into the French Train à Grande Vitesse, which literally means High Speed Train in English, with some distractions and derivatives before talking about the actual TGV on the SNCF, Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français, the French National Railway. The TGV Réseau in France I'll start by writing about an export model of the TGV to Asia, most commonly known as the Korea Train eXpress, operated by the South Korean national railway Korail. The Korean TGV - the KTX Although being just a stone's throw away from Japan, well, relatively speaking, high speed rail was a recent development in South Korea, where the first line went into commercial service in 2004, 40 ye...

I thought this week would be one of those casual, show and tell, kind of a week again, since I did get a chance to go back to my hometown of Toronto for a week. I took the chance to trek around on the Waterfront Trail by East Point and Port Union, near the east end of Lawrence Ave by Lake Ontario (for GO riders, this is between Rouge Hill and Guildwood stations). There, the GO Kingston Sub (since GO owns it from Pickering to the USRC, Union Station Rail Corridor, now) goes along the lakeshore, parallel to the trail, and offers an picturestic view of Ontario's natural beauty. Anyway, enough pretending to be literate. Here comes a video and a couple of pictures.