adventures of a psychopathic magnet

The Miracle Of Czech Trains

I was looking through the Journal I kept for last three weeks I was in Austria, and stumbled across the famous train ride
Rachel and I took from Salzburg to Prague.
First off there is no direct train from Salzburg to Prague. You would think that would be a logical place to have a direct route, seeing as both are big tourist towns. But no, you go Salzburg-Linz- Summerau-Cheske Budejovice-Prague. We chose the 8.10 am departing time getting us into Prague at 2.54pm. A decision we regretted when we awoke hungover. Second Czech trains are a miracle. Somehow, they still work.
The first two trains were fast, fairly quiet Austrian trains. We closed the curtians in our compartment on the first train to aviod worsening our hangovers, something the conductor on the train to Linz found very amusing. The second train was brand new. Then we pulled into Summerau. The last stop before the Czech boarder. The train stops, we move toward the door to exit. There is no platform, no sign, just a little building with a few workers standing out front smoking and two other trains. One train is loaded with VWs being taken from the plant. The other is two to three carriages long, was made around the time of the second world war and hasn't had any work done on it since Stalin was in power. Hoping our train had not arrived or this was just a mail stop, I ask the conductor. He pointed to the antique green train. Dang.
We climb, and seeing as there were no platforms just gravel climb is exactly what we did, aboard our first Czech train and find a compartment to claim for our selves. The first one we see is ours. We drop our bags sit down and look around. We try to close the door to the compartment, it will only close half way, until you are in motion and then will close all the way, but only if you aren't touching it. We try to draw the curtians, there is only one. It is threadbare and only covers the top part of the glass doors. So the door is half closed and the side that is closed is shadded by the curtain. There are no curtains on the windows, those are long gone. There is an interesting smell that can't be identified and a sound somewhere between dripping water and something being hit with a blunt object between the ceiling and the roof, but only when the train is stopped.
After all the customs officials come by, the train lurches into motion. Well, it is more of a quick initial lurch, then some odd grinding that makes you wonder if a small tree is caught in the gears. Luckily we don't travel very fast, or very far. A few miles and we are over the boarder and ready to make our first stop. Stopping is not fun. A little grease would go along way. Before you even see the stop, the breaks are applied. They let out an ear piercing screach that does not stop until the train has reached a complete stop when the mysterious clanging noise takes over acompanied by an odd series of creaks and groans.
Sometime into the ride, Rachel goes off in search of the bathroom. A few minutes later she returned laughing hysterically. She managed to explain, between fits of giggles, that she walked into the water closet next to our compartment to go to the bathroom, but there was no toilet. "I kept spinning around and around thinking I had missed it, but there wasn't one." After a long laugh on just how ghetto Czech trains are, we switched to a slightly larger, slightly less (it had a toilet) crap train to Prague.
Of all the things we did on that trip, that train sticks out as being one of the more suprising, and funny things we did. It was just so crap.

posted by lulu @ 1:17 AM