On self-style tour of the Balkans that began and ended in Vienna, Denis McCabe and I spent a productive afternoon near the Slovenian border station at Jesenice. To the north beyond the formidable wall of the Alps lies Austria.
The mainline south to Ljubljana is electrified at 3,000 volts direct current. The Austrian electrification is high voltage alternating current. A small holding yard at the station was used to change engines and hold freights.
We caught a procession of trains, including a special summer-season passenger train heading to the Bulgarian coast.
The highlight of the visit was this freight the worked with a General Motors diesel off the secondary line that runs southwesterly toward the Italian frontier.
There’s a stiff grade on this line climbing up to Jesenice and we could hear the freight coming long before it came into sight.
Sunny skies were fading as a storm brewed in the mountains beyond. We boarded a local passenger train for Ljubljana and on arrival witnessed an especially violent electrical storm from the station platforms. I’ll post some of those dramatic photos sometime.
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