It’s cold as shit, so I figured I might as well sight, edit and upload my vacation photos from Venice, several months ago. There’s far too much to reshare here, but you can see them on my Flickr. Highlights include:
This sunday, I tagged along with a friend for some trainspotting in the Allgäu. Thanks to a burnt down diesel engine, some ALEX trains near Immenstadt are currently operated with NE81 DMUs that are not indigenous to the region.
While waiting for our mark, we tried some motifs with other trains on the quite busy route from Immenstadt to Obersdorf, like this InterCity:
In 1972, Munich was host to the Olympic Games, and the region got a nice new regional train (S-Bahn) system for this event. The stadium area was connected to the rail network by a new-built station, which was closed down after the games because it wasn’t needed anymore. The subway (U-Bahn) now connects this area to the city center, with Olympia-Einkaufszentrum being the nearest stop to the former station.
I wanted to take some pictures of this ruin for a while now, but never actually went there, mostly because I was told it was a bit hard to find and there’s not much to see anyway. Yesterday, I spontaneously decided to just go there for a couple of photos in the snow. That turned out to be a rather bad idea, because it was hard to make out anything in this weather, and I’ll definitely go back there in the summer.
This is the view across the old station, with the station building barely visible through the falling snow. The rails, catenary poles and platforms are all that remains.
Same location, other direction – the point area has been dismanteled even more.
In addition to the four passenger tracks, there are also some rails that do not connect to any platform and seem to pass the station building. No clue what they were used for back in the day.
As a bonus, I also spotted my first Velaro D (aka “New ICE 3”).
During a recent stay at the hospital, I had the opportunity to experiment a bit with watercolour. Never really having painted before, it turned out to be much fun and also yielded some results that I can show without being ashamed. They are already buried in the deep, dark tunnels of DeviantART, but now I have my own personal blog, I believe they deserve to be on it. 🙂
This here was my first attempt to paint one of my railway photos, and it shows. Colour’s too thick in most places and many things lack structure (like the tracks, for example). By the way, the station shown is Usti n. L. (Czech Republic), and shows my first sighting of a class 380 multi-current engine.
Number Two I like better. It shows a E.444R (“Tartaruga”) in Roma Termini station. I like the FS colouring scheme quite a bit, and the tracks turned out better this time around.
Going back to Czechia, this scene is based on a photo taken in Prague. I don’t really like it, but apparently some other people do. Man, people are hard to paint.
And last but not least, there’s this scene at Praha hl.n., which unfortunately my scanner didn’t really like. I think I overcompensated for my earlier over-colouring and used too much water this time around in many places.
What I want to try next is a more naturalistic style, compared to the rather cartoonish style I’ve been doing so far. I have my own set of watercolours now, so nothing can get in my way.
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