RABe 501 - Blog Posts

It's been a wild couple of weeks in France, so when it got to a point when I had to go outside, I couldn't set my mind to find somewhere interesting. So I settled on nowhere special, just somewhere across the border with a train station and countryside not too far.

Lahr/Schwarzwald. Perfect.

Actually, there was a slight purpose to the trip given the time of day. I was hoping to see what was running on the Frankfurt-Milan "EuroCity Express". I'd seen an Italian train run it before, and this time it was a RABe 501 Giruno, the most recent Swiss high-speed train. I'd seen it before, but not caught a decent shot of it, so here it is!

The busy Karlsruhe-Basel main line sees a lot of traffic: higher speed like the ICE 4 at the very top and the ECE (I say higher because they can't travel at proper high speed because of everything else), regional trains, international freight... Among the inter-city trains out that morning was this Flixtrain, the same Flix who run buses across continental Europe. They have a few lines in Germany, using some old Inter-Regio carriages.

For an outing where I was just expecting to watch trains go by like a cow in a field, I dare say got more than I was banking for that morning, as a Baureihe 708.3 track inspector (Doktor Gelb?) and a brand new Mireo Smart regional set with no livery, either undergoing testing or out for delivery, made some surprise appearances.