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Time it seemed, had been pressed into a bottle. My eyes grabbed at the towns of former East Germany as they occasionally punctuated the grey skies and green landscape, but Neustadt (Dosse) slipped away before I could do more than write the word “desolate” on the back of my ticket envelope. Wittenberge, where a stable of Pazifik-class steam engines had once been housed was a slightly busier place, as I noted in despairing scribbles. Ludwigslust, to which I would later return, cleared ICE1616 on its express track. Zugfuhrer H-J Bucholz went about his business lifting tickets in the sealed quiet of the coaches. A little British flag on his lapel indicated that he spoke English. There was no time to chat with him, however, as the time from the last stop in Berlin-Spandau to the Hamburg-Hauptbahnhof barely gave him time to work through the train. So, I drew no conclusions, formed no grand schemes, met no femme fatales. As someone excitedly noted, it was just like flying! It was March in 2005 and the ICE (InterCity Express) of the German Railways (DB) was carrying me from Berlin-Ostbahnhof to Hamburg-Hauptbahnhof in 1 hour, 49 minutes. In 1969, when I worked in the U.S. Army’s Berlin Brigade Rail Transportation Office, the same 324 km trip would have taken me over 6˝ hours, had I been permitted to make it. Passengers on that 1969 train had been just as isolated from their surroundings; it had been one of the Interzone routes. From 1961 until 1989, Berlin-Hamburg trains ran non-stop through the German Democratic Republic. It was fine now to try the new non-stop service, operating over Germany’s traditionally high-speed route. (In 1933, the Diesel streamliner Fliegende Hamburger made its 175 km/h debut on this important main line.) But I wanted |
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Written for the Rails to Berlin website by R. W. Rynerson May 2005 Segment on the Nicholson Memorial event of 24 March 2005, published in Issue 28 of the BUSMVA Observer |
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The Embracing Forest |
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Did you ever look out the train window and wonder what it would be like to stop in one of those towns? |