All Aboard!

Welcome to the Ironwheels Branchline page, dedicated to rail travel and rail-related sightseeing in the Czech Republic, or Czechia. More generally, this page is aimed at the "Renaissance Railfan", who is interested not only in riding trains, but enjoys everything of a technical, scientific or historical nature. Personally, I enjoy touring castles and chateaux, hiking and cycling in conservation areas, and visiting outdoor museums, and if I can get to these places by train, it makes the trip infinitely more interesting.

When most people hear the name "Czech Republic", they think "Prague". This is a pity. Prague is certainly a beautiful city, with a rich history and exciting present, but there are many interesting attractions out in the boondocks, on one of the country's numerous branch lines. For the curious traveller, who doesn't mind "getting his feet wet", taking a dayliner to your destination will make the trip much more memorable, and can give you some colourful war stories for when you get home. Katherine Hale, in her travelogue "This is Ontario" (published 1937), has a few choice words to say about travelling:

"We thought that there was only one thing for us, or anyone who intended to enjoy the road - it was to draw an extra map of one's own, which should be coloured with associations as well as facts. It would be a map whose design is influenced by experience of travel, and would therefore be of unconventional outline. We knew, for instance, that we would be sure to hurry by some dull, important monument, and to pause with entranced interest beside another, to drive with pleasant or picturesque ghosts out of history, and to step on the gas if they became tiresome, to find modern machinery as fascinating as old houses, and mines as meadowlands.
...A map should record not only the colours of landscapes, but the places and people that make landscape a living thing. If the colours of this map of ours were not fresh and stirring it would be entirely our fault..."

So let's see what kind of map we can draw up as we trundle along the branch lines of Czechia on board one of Czech Railways' distinctive red and yellow dayliners.

Long Live the Dayliners!

There seems to be no universally accepted term in English for these wee beasties: railcar, motor-coach, D.M.U.,railbus, Canadian National Railways called them Railiners. My father always used the Canadian Pacific name of Dayliner, so that's what I learned them as. Whatever you call them, in Czechia, (as almost everywhere else), they are the rulers of the branch lines, carrying people to and from their main-line connections. Slower and less impressive than the high speed inter-city expresses, these motoraks, as the Czechs affectionately call them, are nonetheless more important to the average people, who have a friendly, almost familial, attitude towards them. The Germans, I am told, have a word for these that sums up their "part-of-us" nature - Volksmaschine, or Peoples' Machine. Indeed, a machine for folk, for the ordinary people.

Dayliners and branch lines: Away from the bustling cities and main line expresses, the dayliners can take you into the villages and whistlestops that make up "rural Czechia", giving you a glimpse of the more traditional ways of life. There are no inter-city expresses rushing through Vysoke Myto or Fulnek at triple digit speeds, but these squat, waddling, ugly ducklings trundling past streams and open fields, through deer inhabited woods, into another world. They can take you "into nature", as the Czechs say. On the dayliners, you are surrounded by real people, "locals", who all know each other, and you'll see the conductor sit down and chat about the potato harvest with the old grandad sitting across from you. I myself was born and raised in a small farming town (4500 people), and am used to this slower, more relaxed way of life.

Here is the standard Czech Railways network map, showing all the rail lines with their line numbers. To see an area in more detail, click on that area of the map.

I have divided the country up into four regions, click on the name to see a list of interesting branch lines in that region.

I was born in Walkerton, Ontario, Canada, where my trainspotting activities were severly restricted due to a penchant by Canadian railway operators for cutting back services and then abandoning and finally removing tracks altogether. I now live in Vysoke Myto, Czechia, where I work as an English teacher, translator, and occasional tour guide.

If you have any questions, comments, etc., or you would like some information or advice about travelling to this neck of the woods,