MUDEC Travel Blog

Puzzles in the Cave! This one was finished in less than 48 hours:

I didn't stick around for too long today, but I bet Mario Kart got finished, which will make 4 complete puzzles down here, which is like all of them. I think there's a 3D one and a 63-piece kid's puzzle. Maybe I should buy some puzzles for us?

There is very little to do at Belval-Redange (and CFL plans to merge it with Belvaux-Soleurve eventually), but the French border is nearby, so I visited that:

It's nothing especially visibly remarkable, but I find these physical manifestations (and often definitions!) of political boundaries to be quite neat.

Having killed enough time to catch the next train, I took it a stop down to Belval-Lycée:

I couldn't get to the border easily here due to traffic, but it does have a feature unusual for a station of its size: an elevator!

The tracks take a bridge over the road, so the platform is also above the road. There's a staircase down, or of course the elevator. (If you're curious, it bore a ThyssenKrupp logo.) Train arrival information is conveniently located at both the station and ground levels.

Anyways, after an overall underwhelming Belval-Lycée experience, I decided to walk to Belval-Université to get some pictures of the Lycée that the station was named after. More interesting, though, was a dangerous bridge!

And American culture is never too far away.

Unfortunately, the Mondorf bus ran ~15 minutes late, so we couldn't transfer to Schengen. Instead, we stayed the afternoon in Mondorf, briefly crossing into France and then visiting the Luxembourg Aviation Museum.

We heard my first "Moien!"s of the trip here in Mondorf, and it was the first time that my German really came into use, asking a local who didn't speak English where we could get something to eat.

We came back through Bettembourg. I mention this just because I really like how the buses pass over the trains here, giving it that real interconnected transit vibe.

It spans the length of the very long Concourse A, which is All Delta All The Time™, so it also features Delta branding:

That red nose makes me think of another airline that recently changed their callsign though...

There's two trains, each with a handful of cars each. (I didn't actually count, maybe 3?) They're cable-driven and seem to operate on separate cables/tracks which align at the ends. They mirror each other, so when one train is at the north station, the other is at the south. They meet in the middle, and then swap ends.

The trains stop for about 30 seconds, then move for about 1:30. Therefore they move between platforms about every two minutes, and a train should arrive at each stop (each direction for the middle stop) every 4 minutes. My math suggests that getting to the train -> getting off the train takes an average of 3.5 minutes, as long as you're not going end-to-end. These numbers are extremely rough based on a handful of timings I did and will vary as the system responds to real-world fluctuations with people blocking doors, trying to get on at the last minute, etc. While the trains operate independently, they will always align with each other and might speed up or slow down a little to keep in sync.

More fun facts about the Express Tram (mostly from Wikipedia) include:

It's technically a hovercraft, not a rail vehicle, although it has guide rails so I'm going to count it.

It's completely driverless. DTW workers ride it but they're not conductors or anything.

This is the most interesting thing about Detroit

de:probepfoste bitte ignoriere ihr nicht es wird einen test geben