Blog posts about train at Permanent Tourist

A time-lapse sequence of the journey between Goppenstein and Kandersteg through the Lötschberg tunnel.

The latest project we’ve launched at !frappant is for SBB (Swiss Railways): a microsite for the Rail Control System team, which promotes their work controlling the flow of rail traffic throughout the national network.

Visitors to London may expect that travelling by Tube is quicker than going on foot. It’s certainly quicker than travelling through London by taxi or by car. But is the train actually quicker than this athlete?

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I feel a new long-term photo project coming on…

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The end of the main train line to Interlaken from Zurich, Basel and beyond, via Bern, takes travellers through the centre of the small city, where the train line passes within feet of buildings in the main shopping centre and past the otherwise quiet lanes and back roads along the river.

In January of 2005 – five years ago this week – Jo visited me in Switzerland for the first time. These photos show our wonderful time together.

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An example of an image processed using a simple preset available through the Lightroom Presets website.

I woke a sleeping drunk last night, when the train to Interlaken terminated in Spiez due to the onward line being blocked. He looked at me blurrily and asked whether he needed to catch the onward replacement bus service to get to Grenoble. (Which is in France.) In other words, he’d staggered onto the wrong […]

One of my pictures in 1993 was of the unique tiling at Chalk Farm on the Northern Line, late one evening.

With the arrival of warmer weather and longer, sunnier evenings, I am able to begin using a technique which works in many places with dark, deep shadows and small patches of bright sunlight. Here are a few examples and a description of how to achieve this kind of shot. The shots in this article are […]

At work, we needed to buy both a point-and-shoot video camera and a new stills camera, so, on my advice, we bought a new Nikon D90 which can fulfil both requirements.

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Photos from my last day in Brienz after seven and a half years with Gossweiler Media AG are now online at Flickr.

I received a letter from my new employer today, detailing the first weeks of my employment and lots of interesting sessions they have planned, from “getting to know you” time in the office in Bern to “an hour with the CEO” at the Zürich office. Starting on my first day, I have meetings and sessions […]

By my reckoning, I have made the journey between Brienz and Spiez nearly three and a half thousand times in the past seven and a half years: a phenomenal number of trips backwards and forward for a person who used to long to abandon the car and travel in relaxing comfort on public transport. Back […]

A man, tired, carries his daughter onto the train as she rests her head on his shoulder and sucks her thumb. The train picks up speed and the man stands, resting from the waist on a suitably padded bench, with the girl half asleep and his back to the adjacent window. With each sideways rocking […]

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Torrential rain has hit Switzerland in the worst storms since the heavy flooding experienced two years ago. Sirens sounded the alarm in several parts of the country on Wednesday evening and more than 100 people were evacuated from their homes as rivers and lakes came close to bursting their banks. […] In canton Bern, the […]