I recently visited Budapest for a couple of days, mostly to take a gander at its public transport system.

Rather than go through my trip chronologically, like I did for my Japan trip, this time I'll go by mode of transport.

Trams

Budapest operates roughly five types of trams today:

1. the Ganz CSMG, a domestically-built articulated high-floor tram from the 1960s. Some trains were refurbished and are now called the KCSV-7, but I am not quite sure how to visually distinguish the two.

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A collection of signs and ads I came across and found amusing and/or interesting during my stay in Japan.

Monday, December 29th - Transfer to Tokyo

Time to get back to Tokyo. I stayed in a different hotel near Shimbashi station this time. Since all my hotels were budget options, I wanted to hedge my bets in case one of them absolutely sucked, but all the places I stayed were pretty nice.

I had reserved a seat on the Shinkansen in advance, but woke up way too early. I was still able to change my reservation to an earlier train, but still had to wait an hour for a train that had a window seat on...

Monday December 22nd - Transfer to Osaka

With week 1 already over, I hopped onto the Hikari after an awful night of sleep. My original plan was to leave the train at Nagoya and visit the SCMaglev museum. However, this plan failed because storing my luggage near Nagoya station was simply impossible. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, because the trains hadn't even been that full, but the coin lockers were filled to the brim.

So I just had a quick lunch near the station, then hopped onto...

I am in Japan! (At least I am while writing this part.)

I've wanted to go there since 2018, finally had the funds to go in early 2020, and then COVID struck. After that, various personal things got into the way, and only this summer did I finally decided to spend my christmas vacation this year there.

The itinerary was rather simple: one week in Tokyo, then one in Osaka, then another week in Tokyo. All direct flights from Munich to Japan go to Haneda, and I did not want to take a multi-hour ...

Boso View Express, or BVE for short, is one of those train simulators that have been around for a very long time but never quite managed to establish themselves at the top of the food chain, at least not here in the west. But if you want to simulate Japanese railways, BVE is essentially the holy grail.

You can find a huge variety of routes and vehicles, all of them with appropriate train protection and signalling systems courtesy of a highly-flexible plugin interface, for absolutely no money a...

Just giving a quick shout-out to this Tumblr, which combines a thing I like with a thing I like: Trains In Games

A collection of photos from a trip to Venice

A collection of photos from Munich's long-defunct "Olympiabahnhof".

Recently, I did a couple of trips to Zürich for a job application (it didn't work out). This also meant I had a couple of hours for some photographing each time. Yay!

The first thing of note is the Sihltal-Zürich-Uetlibergbahn (SZU). They operate two lines, the Sihltalbahn (with 15 kV 16.7 Hz AC) and the Uetlibergbahn (with 1250 V DC). Funnily enough, both lines share the tracks on the last kilometer or so before reaching the central station, so somehow they need two separate power lines on th...