Its been a travel day , journeying from Heidelberg to Plzen in the Czech Republic. There are several ways to travel between the two but the most interesting is to go straight over the heavily wooded Sumava Mountains through the Bavarian/Bohemian Forest.
The first part of the journey was by express train from Heidelberg via Stuttgart and Nuernberg to a junction station on the main line to Vienna called Plattling. At Plattling you boad a train formed of two German single unit railcars that starts to climb almost as soon as it leaves. The destination is a very interesting station called.
Bayerisch Eisenstein / Zelezna Ruda-Alzbetin
The station sits right on the German/Czech border and I mean right on the border with the dividing line between the two countries passing straight through the middle of the station building and across the platform. Bayerisch Eisenstein is the German half and Zelezna Ruda-Alzbetin is the Czech half.
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| The station was built so the border ran through the middle of the door and the room inside |
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| On the platform the border is marked by the red line and stones set into the platform |
Whilst the German trains are rail cars so can just shuttle in and out, the Czech trains are loco + coaches so the engine has to change ends on arrival for the journey back. It can only do that by crossing into the German half of the station.
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| German railcars |
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| Czech loco + coaches |
In todays world all this is very easy and simple, but before end of communism in 1989, the Iron Curtain ran right through the middle of the station. Whilst the German half continued to function as a station, the Czech half was within the Border Control Zone and so was out of bounds. Lines were severed, fences and watch towers erected and walls built.
Today the station is at the centre of a cross border National Park, the station building houses a small museum and a National Park Visitor Centre and a lot of the stations on the lines in both countries are the starting points for hiking trails,
The trains from the border should and do in normal circumstances run straight through to Plzen and on to Prague, but there was some summer engineering work going on. Instead of taking the replacement bus from Klatovy, I undertook a large detour along a scenic single track rural line with request stop halts, once again served by small railcars. It was quite a long detour but worth it.
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