Railroad Crossing without Any Cars

...Can you spell that without any 'R's?

Tom gave us the header challenge theme of Railroad for this week.

 My local railroad pictures are not of riding on the trains but walking near the tracks, such as this foggy morning when I walked through town.

 It doesn't take a fog for the railroad crossings to pose some fascination, though.

 Some interesting angles. Did you realize how high those lights stand?

 We have had one major trip where the railroad was the main experience of the journey rather than just the mode of transportation. One does not set out on the Transiberian Railway to simply get from one place to another. The Transiberian Railway is an experience in itself. At every station there would be people gathered on the platform for a variety of reasons. Some are traveling.

 Some are selling goods to the passengers. This lady has fresh berries. One compartment mate hopped off the train at an early morning stop and brought us breakfast pastries. (His name was Slas and he looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger.) At one stop, we could have purchased chandeliers or stemware from workers from the local glassworks, who received part of their salaries in goods.

The Transiberian Railway stretches from Moscow to Vladivostok. We traveled about half of that way.

 We traveled by train while we were in the UK as well. Not quite as exotic, unless you might be looking for Platform 9 3/4 at Charing Cross Station.

 The awesome architecture looks like it is ready to swallow up the trains.

 They could be off to Hogwarts, but then, apparently I may have the wrong station, as Harry and his friends left from Kings Cross.

This notice board as we traveled from Wales to London was a bit distressing, though our own train was traveling and on time. I forget what the reason for the cancelled routes.

It was not as alarming as the experience in Novosibirsk, Russia, though. We were dropped off by taxi at the train station with no escort as we usually had when leaving or arriving at a city. We entered the station to look for our scheduled departure on the departure board (which we would have had to sound out in its Cyrillic letters) and found nothing but wires hanging out of the board. Trains were being announced. In Russian. Ours was late and no one spoke English. Our thirty words of Russian were not very helpful. It is one of the adventures of foreign travel.

 

I have chosen this image from our UK travel as my header. It just speaks that thousand words that a picture is worth. It was taken as we left Edinburgh.

 

The rest of the header challenge crew are linked in my sidebar. Visit them and check out their railroads.

By the way, "that" is spelled T-H-A-T whether you have any Rs available or not.