Swiss Spectacular, Part 3: Finding freight

OLTEN, Switzerland — Just about every railfan knows what it’s like to have one of those days when you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So it was for me today in Olten.

This is not a city high on the must-see list for most vacationers. It doesn’t even warrant a mention in my Lonely Planet guide, although the Swiss Tourism website has a fairly extensive entry. But I came for one reason: trains.

The 12-track Olten station has the usual parade of passenger traffic, but what makes it a bit different is that it also has an unusually healthy freight component: trans-European cargo traveling two main routes — via the Gotthard Base Tunnel and the Lotschberg tunnel — passes through here. And so, yes, I saw a lot of freight — strange though these 15- to 30-car trains may be to someone coming from the land of Precision Scheduled Railroading,.

Seeing freight trains, though, was one thing. Getting good photos was quite another.

You see, those trains can pass through the Olten station on any of those 12 tracks — and with no good bridge over the tracks at either end of the station, you can really only pick a spot and hope for the best. You can still get photos if you’re not in the right place, of course, but between the passenger traffic, the catenary and light poles, and various other forms of visual clutter, those photos are going to be something less than Steinheimer-ish. Add in the time that I took to walk around the town, eat, and occasionally get out of the heat (it remains unusually warm here), and my window of opportunity was less than it might have been.

The net result was that, as sundown approached, I had seen quite a few freight trains, but had decent photos of none of them. More in desperation than anything else, I moved over to the westernmost station platform at the station’s north end, where I would have the best light, and cast a wary eye on the narrowing distance between the sun and the hillsides to the west. Give it until 7:30, I thought.

With maybe 15 minutes to spare, I finally had some luck in the form of a classic SBB boxcab with a train of refrigerated containers for Swiss grocery chain Migros.

After that, with everything in shadows, I picked up a couple more freights in short order — a BLS Cargo container train, and DB Freight moving a solid train of Toyotas.

Oh, one last thing. The building behind the train of Toyotas is the Hotel Amaris. That’s where I’m staying tonight. You might say it’s fairly conveniently located to the station. That, and its air conditioning, are more than enough for me to give it a hearty recommendation.