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Norwegian TV documentary: 7 hrs from engineer's cab across the mountains

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Norwegian TV documentary: 7 hrs from engineer's cab across the mountains
Posted by steinjr on Monday, November 30, 2009 1:30 PM

 Hi --

 Norwegian State Television channel 2 just had a pretty cool TV documentary for a rail fan - a 7 hour 16 minutes long TV show documenting every minute of the journey of passenger train 602 from Bergen on the west coast of Norway, up along the fjords, across the mountains and down the valleys into south-eastern Norway, before ending up at the Central Station in the capital city of Oslo in SE Norway.

 Show was broadcast live on NRK channel two Friday November 27th, from 8 pm until a little after 3 am, and at the same time available for streaming from the webpages of NRK TV.

  According to the ratings info about 150 000 viewers watched the entire show, all 7+ hours of it, from the El-18 Electric Locomotive pulled its B7 passenger cars out of Bergen station, until they arrived, a little embarrassing 10 minutes late at Oslo Central (due to signal trouble on the last mile of the journey - how is that for luck when you have a film crew aboard ?).

 If anyone wants to have a peek, the show can be viewed, in three pieces, at this web address:

 Part one of the TV show: http://www1.nrk.no/nett-tv/klipp/581376
Part two: http://www1.nrk.no/nett-tv/klipp/581377
Part three: http://www1.nrk.no/nett-tv/klipp/581378

 Might be smart to wait until evening in the US before viewing, when people in Norway is asleep and the servers have less load.

 Commentaries are in Norwegian, but the view and the music should also be enjoyable for rail fans  who don't speak Norwegian.

 Some more background on the show (written by me a couple of weeks ago, not copied from any web page or suchlike): 

  In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Oslo-Bergen railroad line (which crosses the mountainous central spine of Norway to get from Oslo in the lowlands in SE Norway to Bergen on the Atlantic ocean on the west coast of Norway, Norwegian TV channel NRK 2 has recorded a full trip from Oslo to Bergen across the mountains.

It was a major project for a young nation - Norway only regained it's full independence in 1905, after being par of Denmark for about 400 years from the late 1300s until 1814, and being forced into a union with Sweden for 93 years, from 1814 until 1905.

The trip, which is about 500 kilometers long, and will pass through a total of 182 tunnels in 7hrs and 16 minutes, was recorded in October 2009, using 4 cameras - one showing the engineer's view, two showing the view out windows on either side of the train, and one used to record footage among the passengers.

They plan to actually broadcast the entire trip, ie starting their broadcast at 7:55 pm CET on Friday November 27th, and continuing until a little past 3 am local time, alternating between showing footage shot from the four cameras on the train, and (when the train is in tunnels) showing historic footage from the construction of the railroad line (ie from 1909).

Sounds like a dream situation for a hardcore railfan. I am actually impressed that management at NRK TV went for it. Of course, they do have three TV channels (of which NRK2 is the channel for documentary shows and suchlike), and they are funded by the tax payers, so they don't have to please people selling soap or cereal, but still.

I might need to get a recorder with a hard disk that can record a 7 hour show, just for the heck of it :-)

More history (in English) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergen_Line

Smile,
Stein

 

 

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Posted by beaulieu on Monday, November 30, 2009 3:30 PM
The video taping is cheaper, however I had already bought the DVDs of the journey from "Ticket to Ride" in the UK. I am surprised the NSB didn't just buy the rights to the film shot by Tim Martin and TTR. As they had given him access to the locomotive for his filming and he shoots with a broadcast quality camera. They could have removed his English soundtrack and substituted their own in Norwegian.
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Posted by wjstix on Monday, November 30, 2009 4:33 PM

steinjr

  According to the ratings info about 150 000 viewers watched the entire show, all 7+ hours of it, from the El-18 Electric Locomotive pulled its B7 passenger cars out of Bergen station, until they arrived, a little embarrassing 10 minutes late at Oslo Central (due to signal trouble on the last mile of the journey - how is that for luck when you have a film crew aboard ?).

10 minutes late would probably be the best time of the year for a typical Amtrak train !!  Smile

 

Stix
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Posted by steinjr on Monday, November 30, 2009 10:50 PM

beaulieu
The video taping is cheaper, however I had already bought the DVDs of the journey from "Ticket to Ride" in the UK. I am surprised the NSB didn't just buy the rights to the film shot by Tim Martin and TTR.

  As they had given him access to the locomotive for his filming and he shoots with a broadcast quality camera. They could have removed his English soundtrack and substituted their own in Norwegian.

 Had a quick look around to see what you were talking about - found www.tickettoride.co.uk and their DVDs no TTR54, 55, 56 and 57.

 I am sure the TTR production also looks great, even though I noticed a few odd things on their web page, like the weird hybrid spelling "Flåmbahn" (which seems to be a mix of Norwegian and German) for the side line from Myrdal to Flåm, ie Flåmsbana), and the reference to "Agenda Units - the NSBs latest".

 Agenda was a fancy marketing name for "regional train" or "corridor train" a while back (between 1999 and 2005). Some marketing droid came up with the brand names "Signatur" (Signature in English) for long distance train, "Agenda" for regional/medium distance trains and "Puls" (Pulse in English) for local trains, the idea being that the first would be marketed for tourists, the second for business people and the third for commuter operations.

 Organization droids were starting to split up NSB into three different divisions that would handle the various "products".

 The audience remained somewhat underwhelmed by the marketing names, and kept referring to the trains as long distance trains, regional trains and commuter trains. Eventually NSB figured out that it is not the name that matters - it is the train frequency (number of departures and time between departure), and the predictability.

 What was once called Agenda service (utilizing three different types of trains - Electric Motor Unit sets of type 70 and type 73b, and Diesel Motor Units of type 90) is now called "regionstog" (Regional trains), and tend to have fairly frequent departures - e.g between Skien and Lillehammer I believe these trains have 18 round trips per day. Plus of course there being other trains in addition that also stops at the larger places between e.g Oslo and Lillehammer.

 Anyways - I guess you now have the option of taking the trip in both directions - eastbound from Bergen to Oslo in the fall of 2009 (NRK TV show, filmed on the 100th anniversary of the line, and which looks a lot better on TV - the quality of the streaming video is cut down quite a bit relative to the stuff that was broadcast on TV, at least for my line speed and computer), and westbound from Oslo to Bergen (TTR production), about 5-10 years ago.

 Not much of a problem, in my opinion Big Smile

 Grin,
 Stein

 

 

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Posted by Annonymous on Tuesday, December 29, 2009 6:59 AM

Thought I'd post an update to this thread.

The entire program is available for free download in HD quality (torrent):
http://nrkbeta.no/2009/12/18/bergensbanen-eng/

Here's a time-lapse video of the whole thing; take a trip across Norway in 7 minutes and 14 seconds! EnjoySmile
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Zybcu1Jzg

Svein

 

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Posted by daveklepper on Tuesday, December 29, 2009 8:57 AM

Viewed the cojpressed version and was impressed that about 15% of route seems to be in tunnels!

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Posted by Annonymous on Tuesday, December 29, 2009 10:13 AM

daveklepper

Viewed the cojpressed version and was impressed that about 15% of route seems to be in tunnels!

 

Wow! Did you just guestimate, or did you look it up? It's actually 15,5% (73km tunnels, 471,25km total).

Svein

 

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Posted by BaltACD on Wednesday, December 30, 2009 10:12 AM

Svein

daveklepper

Viewed the cojpressed version and was impressed that about 15% of route seems to be in tunnels!

 

Wow! Did you just guestimate, or did you look it up? It's actually 15,5% (73km tunnels, 471,25km total).

Svein

 

I thought there were a lot of dark seconds in the compressed version....also notice the train waiting to meet a freight or two....so Amtrak isn't the only passenger hauler that gets delayed by freight.

Never too old to have a happy childhood!

              

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Posted by steinjr on Wednesday, December 30, 2009 11:14 AM

BaltACD
I thought there were a lot of dark seconds in the compressed version....also notice the train waiting to meet a freight or two....so Amtrak isn't the only passenger hauler that gets delayed by freight.

 

 Most freight trains are scheduled over here. So meets were probably also scheduled.

 Passenger train was on schedule until 5 minutes before the end station in Oslo - it arrived in the last station about 7-8 or so minutes late, due to a balky entry signal just before Oslo Central - took a little time to work around that one.

 On the other hand - the last couple of days has been bad train wise. It is a little on the chilly side - about 0 Fahrenheit, and we have just had a fire in signal cables in a tunnel just west of Oslo.

 So the train from Bergen to Oslo (and the train in the opposite direction) is re-routed north around Asker to reduce congestion there (and some local commuter trains are replaced by busses), while they rebuild the burnt out cables and signals.

 They got most through traffic going again in a few hours, but it will be a pretty cold and crappy job for the signal maintainers from the Railroad Authority (jernbaneverket) to get signaling for the commuter operations fixed good enough to resume a normal schedule  - it will probably take several days to fix. 

 Hope they both get their things fixed quickly, so we can get trains back on schedule - people will not take the train instead of their cars if the train doesn't have reasonably frequent and predictable departures and arrivals. Fortunately, most people is off from work until Monday January 5th.

 The 29th also was a bad day - there was a three hour delay on the Kongsvinger line on the 29th - signal malfunction.  And NSB trains also had a passenger train break down on the main line between Trondheim and Oslo on the 29th - 350 pax stranded for 4+ hours (more than half the normal travel time) in the cold before they (and the people on the next southbound train load of people behind them) could be transferred to a new train and busses and taken south.

 Anyways - what cause delays is usually not freight trains. Infrastructure issues (like signal problems) or equipment failures. Replacement and refurbishment programs are under way, but there is quite a bit of lead time on these things, so we really should have ordred new stuff long before we started having service failures.

 Oh well - planning far ahead is always hard, no matter if you live on yearly budgets or quarterly return statements.

 Smile,
 Stein

 

 

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Posted by BNSFwatcher on Wednesday, January 13, 2010 4:08 PM

How many Nobel Prizes have been/will be awarded for your undertaking?

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Posted by steinjr on Thursday, January 14, 2010 1:09 AM

BNSFwatcher

How many Nobel Prizes have been/will be awarded for your undertaking?

 

 Mmm - I'd think about as many as there will be Republican presidents of the US of A during the next couple of years.

 May I ask you a question in return ? Why do some conservative Americans react as if they are suffering from a cultural inferiority complex the size of the great and noble states of Texas, Alaska and Montana combined, whenever anyone mentions anything about passenger railroading in Europe?

 Smile,
 Stein

 

 

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