The First Race Car I Supported: The McLaren MP4/13-Mercedes

Towers and trains at Oberwesel

Downstream from Bacharach and Kaub seen in the most recent posts, Oberwesel is a gorgeous town on the left-hand side of the Rhine, with many of its medieval walls and towers still standing. The railway was built alongside these walls near the river, and even goes between two towers, the Katzenturm (left) and Ochsenturm (right). Add the hills in the background, and it is certainly a spectacular train spot.

Here is another tower, the Haagsturm, in a view from the station platforms. (I just got off that train and failed to position myself in time to get the sign out of the way bottom left.) The two trains shown were the only types visible that day, as the intercity traffic was diverted to the other side of the river via Wiesbaden.

Further from the river, another section of town walls and towers runs through the hills. In the centre of the picture above, taken from the short but steep Elfenlay trail, is the Kuhhirtenturm (with raised drawbridge), with St Martin's Church rising behind it.

Oh alright, have a wider view from the Elfenlay.

Plan Incliné de Saint-Louis-Arzviller

This is going to be a rather long post as there is a lot to say about this thing! But the short version is: this is a boat lift.

Built in the 1960s, this "inclined plane" was designed to carry barges as part of the fluvial coal transportation industry. However, that trade declined pretty much during the edifice's construction, and today, it almost exclusively serves leisure boats. But if you're going to do a canal cruise, this thing gives it quite the difference!

Its function is that of a lock, taking boats from the lower water level to the higher level, or vice-versa, but it does this by technically being a lift or elevator. A caisson carries the boats and the water up and down, using counterweights to ease the travel.

In fact, the caisson will take on more or less water in order to be heavier or lighter than the counterweights. Though the total mass of the caisson and counterweights is enormous, the difference in mass between them isn't, so very little power is needed to get the system moving, and gravity does most of the work. Two relatively modest electric motors (centre of photo below, steps to the right for scale) start the movement and control the speed.

As such, the system uses comparatively little power, for impressive results. The boat lift was built to bypass a "ladder" of 17 locks which required a whole day to go through, while the travel time of the lift is just 4 minutes. The ride is seamless and very comfortable, effortless even, for reasons mentioned above but also because the effort is distributed across 5 times as many cables as physically required to hold everything together!

Water-tightness is also extremely important, not just for the caisson obviously, but also for the other doors, particularly the top door, which is holding back a whole length of canal. A serious incident in 2013 has led to further reinforcement of redundancies and the construction of an emergency dam closer to the lift in the event of major leaks.

With a lot of freight traffic in mind, the structure was actually designed for two caissons, side-by-side, as evidenced by a second gate hole visible at the top of the ramp (4th picture), and extra space at the bottom, visible in the final picture below. Doubling the caissons would have meant doubling the counterweights, and a second set of rails were laid for that scenario and are visible in the 4th picture. As mentioned earlier, demand dwindled as the lift was being built, so it never operated with two caissons.

For a long time, this place was a childhood memory, visited during a school trip. In my hiking spree after the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns, I sought this place out again and was glad to see it was still working. And just this week, I returned with my parents and rode the lift! It's without doubt one of my favourite pieces of engineering.

I saw it once! Kind of.

After Gion Matsuri in Kyoto last summer, I was catching a train back to Nagoya and noticed lots of people on the opposite platform. I thought nothing more of it, but when I boarded my train, the windows were... yellowed out. I figured out what was happening fairly quickly, but I probably wouldn't have had time to get back out and take a good picture.

Hopefully one will be preserved either at JR West's museum in Kyoto, or at JR Tokai's SC Maglev Railway Park in Nagoya next to its predecessor.

ドクターイエロー。

The Montech water slope

At around the same time as the "Inclined Plane" of Saint-Louis-Arzviller, other types of boat lifts were being engineered in other places. One of these was the Montech water slope, situated in Southern France on the Canal Parallel to the Garonne (Canal Latéral à la Garonne), the canal from Toulouse to Bordeaux which most people would probably refer to as the Canal du Midi - a better-known term though strictly speaking, the Canal du Midi is only the section from Toulouse to the Mediterranean.

From what I can garner, the two-headed vehicle used on this slope is a conjoining of two Diesel railcars built by Soulé in the early 70s, running on tyres and featuring a daunting-looking shield. This shield would be lowered behind a boat, and the machine would travel up and down the slope, carrying along the boat and the water it bathed in!

However, the performance of this system is less impressive than the Inclined Plane. It bypasses 5 locks, and saves 45 minutes of travel time. That's not nothing, but if you arrived at an end and just missed the train, then going straight to the locks wasn't going to be much longer than waiting for the next one. Also, far more power is required to make this work (I'm reading 1000 hp motors, versus 125 hp for the Inclined Plane), and it's Diesel.

These photos were taken in late 2017, 8 years after the water slope closed. It was only serving leisure boats by then, and, as I've insinuated, it wasn't very economical to run. As far as I can tell, the 5 locks beside it never closed, and are in use today.

The slope and its tractor have since been renovated, and the site's current state can be seen in a Tim Traveller video published in 2021.

Coot chicks in Schaffhausen and herons in flight at Konstanz. That is all for today.

Hikone Sawayama: summit & castle

It's not about what is there today, as much as it's about what was there. Sawayama was the original location of Hikone Castle, and it is quite possibly the most important castle in Japan to have been completely lost, as it was the castle of Ishida Mitsunari, the leader of the Western Army which lost the battle to unite Japan following the death of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. There are so few traces of the castle, no obvious tell-tale structures... This small altar may trace its roots back to the days of the castle, or maybe not, but this is just about it.

Sawayama Castle was thoroughly dismanted after 1600 following the defeat of Ishida, as the new lord of the area, Ii Naomasa, appointed by the victorious Tokugawa clan, relocated the castle to a smaller hill closer to Lake Biwa. Hikone Castle, which still stands today, basically recycled the materials from Sawayama, and the view of the "new" castle complex and the lake is the main draw for hikers today.

The summit offers good views of the mountains on the other side too, with the industrial complexes near Maibara, most noticeably Fujitec and their 170 m-tall elevator test tower, in the foreground.

@chitaka45 just published some gorgeous photos of Shinsen-en in the snow (I love their photos in general BTW, Kyoto's shrines and temples in all their glory!). I found this place by chance while walking to Nijô-jô in 2016 - different season, different colours.

Part garden, part temple, part shrine, Shinsen-en dates back to the start of the Heian period, when it was an Imperial property. One of its most distinctive features is the Dragon Boat, which apparently serves for Moon viewing events. Several Japanese seasonal traditions, like Moon viewing and cherry blossom viewing, are said to originate in Heian-period Kyôto.

Golden Week has begun in Japan, and this quick succession of public holidays ends with Children's Day on 5 May. It's for this occasion that the koinobori, or carp streamers, are brought out. Here are some flying over Asuka-gawa in Kashihara during my visit in 2018, with Unebi-yama, at the base of which Kashihara-jingû is located, in the background below.

My part of France is also on school break. With my homework done, it's time to get out and about again for my own Golden Week!

Climbing Toba Hinoyama

The road (and I guess that is the only downside: it is a road all the way) to the top of Hinoyama starts with the welcoming entrance to Jôan-ji temple.

After some 800 m uphill, past a rather large resort hotel, a chance for a break appears: a viewpoint with a camera stand (which may have been the first time I noticed one! very handy for group shots, though I was alone of course), and an art garden called Medaka no Gakkô, or the school of rice fish. Not knowing that at the time (I looked it up for this piece!), I didn't notice the fish, but I did notice the art and the wisteria in full bloom.

Most of the climbing is done at this point, and it's only another 300 m to the entrance to the shrines at the top of Hinoyama. Shrines, plural, and of various sizes, as the modest Hakuryû Inari-jinja sits next to the grander Toba branch of Kotohira-gû.

On the right, at the bottom of the stairs of Kotohira-gû, one finds the donors' board, and an inviting path... to the views shown in the previous post.

Schwarzwaldbahn Erlebnispfad

or the Black Forest Railway Adventure Trail!

The railway through Triberg climbs the hill opposite the waterfalls we covered yesterday, to get out of the Gutach valley and proceed to Villingen. But inclines are notoriously difficult for trains, as metal-on-metal contact yields little friction, so, like many other modes of transport, whether roads or even footpaths, the railway weaves its way up... but on a larger scale, as trains aren't as maneuverable!

The result is this loopy section between Hornberg and Sommerau, 11 km apart in a straight line, but the railway is 26 km long! It climbs 447 m at an average gradient of 1.7% (which, again, for a train, is hard work), and with over 30 tunnels to get through the irregular terrain. Today, an "Adventure Trail" complements the route opposite Triberg, providing hikers with amazing viewpoints and some chances to get close to the tracks.

Of course, this climb for hikers is far, far steeper! The route I took started with a strenuous 15% over 700 m. One would be very happy to find this bench after that climb - Liegewagen meaning "sleeper car"!

The trail has stations with information boards about various aspects of the railway, and, at the viewpoints, the timetable! Perhaps a bit of a downer is that there isn't a huge amount of traffic: just two DB Regio trains per hour (presumably the ones you came in on), one InterCity train at weekends, no high-speed ICEs, no freight. But the views more than make up for the low variety, and, at a decent pace, it is possible to be at a viewpoint for each passage and not miss one.

Most regional trains on this section of the Schwarzwaldbahn are push-pull sets with Dosto carriages - that's short for Doppelstockwagen, or double-deck. The end carriage seen above is a (deep breath)... DBpbzfa 766, each letter being short for some technical info allowing rail workers to know at a glance what they're dealing with: D is for double-deck, B second-class seating, p has air conditioned coach rooms (as opposed to compartments), b has wheelchair accessibility, z has a centralised electrical installation, f has a driving cab, and finally a means that the driver can operate the doors alone. 766 is the series number. These Dosto sets are usually driven by Baureihe 146 locomotives.

All in all, the Erlebnispfad can take up most of an afternoon (I completed the circuit in around 3 hours), it was a very satisfying walk and experience to be able to make the most of each vantage point. There are some other attractions along the route that I haven't mentioned - probably a short post tomorrow. For people who like hiking and trains, this trail at Triberg is worth doing!