Wednesday 30 January 2002. We have dragged the ladies from the more specialised products at the candle factory and the coach drops us off at a railway station.
The rails are somewhat close together. This is the narrow guage Ziller Valley Railway and we shall be travelling by steam train. It's possible that the men are more excited by this than the ladies, but to be fair, they have had more excitement today already than is good for them...
To say that it is cold would be akin to saying that a volcano is warm... The Zillertal Railway, to give it its local name, follows the valley of the River Ziller and so runs alongside the road for much of its route. It opened in 1902 and today uses mostly railcars for passengers or diesel locomotives for goods traffic but with steam trains aimed at the tourist. That's us!
Our train carriages are nicely lined up and coupled together, but the steam engine hasn't arrived yet. I suspect they are having to melt the ice in the boiler to make water to boil it to make steam to .... Look, don't ask me...
Something looking vaguely like a steam engine turns up. It looks like an enormous water tank alongside the boiler, but remember, it's narrow guage. The engine is only small to begin with.
It backs up to the train and is coupled on. We get on board. Literally - the seats are wooden and absolutely freezing. The windows are also frozen and opaque. Stupidly I touch one to rub the ice away and my hand sticks to it. So much that it hurts when I pull my hand away!
Then as we get underway, the heat from the boiler is pumped through pipes passing through each carriage and the windows clear. Unfortunately the pipe is touching my ankle and ... YEOW! Soon one side of me is boiling whilst the other side stays cold.
We arrive at Fügen, where we all get off the train and have some free time before rejoining the coach. Fügen is celebrated as the place where the beautiful Christmas carol Silent Night was written and first sung.
The steam locomotive has its water tanks replenished and then leaves. The small town is clustered on one side of the railway station and open fields lead across the valley to the mountains on the other side. I almost expected to hear Charles Bronson's harmonica from the 1968 spaghetti western film Once Upon a Time in the West...
One of the Zillertal's modern fleet comes through then we head for the town and find some lunch before the time comes to get back on the coach for our afternoon stop in Rattenburg.
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