21st September 2012 - Vienna here we comeFriday 21st September 2012 The first day of JandJ’s Autumn extravaganza; this year’s trip ended up being a little longer than we originally anticipated due to various factors so on this overcast Friday morning it was all aboard a BA Airbus 319 to Vienna for the start of over three weeks of train riding and photographing through at least four countries. Tickets for this trip were a combination of FIP coupons, Inter Rails and ordinary tickets where the services concerned don’t accept the above. The aforementioned BA flight turned out to be pretty full and we got away with the minimum of hanging around, which is relatively unusual for Heathrow. On the approaches to Vienna, we flew straight in from the west which was also unusual as we are sure that every other time we have flown in the plane has looped round the city and landed from the East. The actual arrival time was some 15 minutes early and was followed by a route-march round what felt like most of the terminal before getting to passport control and collecting the bags and we consider that we did pretty well to be departing on one of the local trains only 34 minutes after the plane coming to a halt on the stand. We chose not to catch the “CAT” (City Airport Train) as it firstly terminates in a relatively inconvenient place for where we needed to get to; secondly costs more than the local train and thirdly we have had both the locos that normally run on this service (1116 141/2) for haulage. We were then somewhat “withered” when required 1116 167 shot past on a CAT service whilst we were waiting for our next train at Rennweg. After arriving at the remains of Wien Südbf, we fed some money into the ticket machine to get a tram ticket (8 day “Klimakarte”) and found a number 18 tram, not forgetting to validate the newly purchased ticket in the machine on board. The tram stop was right outside our hotel near Wien Westbf (Ibis Wien Mariahilf) so it was easy enough to stagger over the road, book in then walk down to the local Billa supermarket for some supplies (six large bottles of water) As we were now in possession of a valid ticket for the day on local transport, we headed for Wien Meidling via line U6 to see what we could find and it wasn’t long before a required class 2016 diesel appeared on a peak hour train heading towards Wiener Neustadt. This turned out to be at the head of a pair of trains coupled together (one going to Hartberg, the rear one to Neckenmarkt-Horitschon), not an unusual sight on this line in the peak as doing this saves paths on what is a busy line. We quickly found a new class 1116 “Taurus” loco to get us back to Meidling where our thoughts turned to dinner but these thoughts were quickly forgotten when we bumped into a well-known enthusiast who lives in Vienna who persuaded us to join him on an EC heading towards the Czech Republic. Not wishing to go all the way to Břeclav, which would involve quite a late finish, we hopped off at Simmering where there was a choice of two trains back to Wien Südbf Ost –the first one was another required 2016 loco which polished off the afternoon nicely.
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