offpeakfang

The Passerelle du Collège looking moody in the evening, Lyon, March 2020. Continuing with my truncated microstates itinerary, my next journey was from Geneva to Monaco. Any form of transport between the two involved changing at Lyon, so I took the Transport Express Régional (TER) from Geneva to Lyon. It runs every few hours with old but comfortable carriages, going along the Rhone valley through the Jura mountains. As a TER service, the tickets cost the same on the day as booked in advance and so I just bought my ticket from the SNCF machine in the France-bound section of the station.  Preparing to leave Geneva station from the customs-controlled platforms.  As Switzerland is part of the Schengen area but not part of the EU customs union, travelling between Switzerland and the EU can involve customs checks but not immigration checks. The trains to France leave from special customs-controlled platforms accessed through a customs control corridor, where the customs officers just...

Loading from the beach at Felixstowe, June 2020 River ferries are a dying breed. A look at the excellent Ordnance Survey map archive on the National Library of Scotland website shows river ferry crossings all over the rivers of East Anglia, but in an age where cars are the most common form of transport, only a few remain for the benefit of walkers and cyclists.  The foot ferry between Felixstowe, Harwich and Shotley was started in its current three-destination form by the Great Eastern Railway in 1912, with its services passing to the London and North Eastern Railway and eventually to British Rail . For much of the 20th century until 1996, the route was served by  MV Brightlingsea, now on the National Historic Ships Register . The Harwich and Dovercourt history website gives lots of history on ferries around the rivers Stour and Orwell.  Today, the Harwich Harbour Ferry is an ex-lifeboat from the former ocean liner Canberra. While it now lands onto the beach at Felixsto...