#thurbo

The Baureihe 612 RegioSwinger is the fastest train on the route. It's a tilting Diesel multiple unit, and I already talked about it after my previous visit to Singen and Schaffhausen. It is the only type that runs the line in full between Basel Bad Bf and Singen as Regional Express (RE) 3, and does so in under 90 minutes (113 km @ 77 km/h).

Parallel to the express services are the omnibus Regional Bahn (RB), mainly RB 30 between Basel Bad Bf and Lauchringen. The workhorses on these routes are Baureihe 641 railcars, cousins of the French A TER, and Baureihe 644 Talent units. Coincidentally, both types were the final designs from small companies De Dietrich and Waggonfabrik Talbot in the 1990s, just before they were bought out by giants Alstom and Bombardier respectively (and later on, Alstom would absorb Bombardier).

Diesel multiple units need... well, Diesel, and if you were wondering, here's a fuel station, visible from the Swiss platform at Waldshut. Signs reading "612" and "644" on the right are clearly the stopping points for the types mentioned above. If you know how annoying it can be to have the petrol pump on the wrong side of your car, imagine how bad it'd be a for a train! Also, 641s can get lost apparently... (I'm guessing they can use another type's board.)

One track at Waldshut is electrified: the one to Switzerland, a country notorious for having electrified its entire passenger network. The train I boarded at Waldshut was a Thurbo-operated RABe 526 GTW, the one with the "power pack" module in the middle.

The Austrian Vorarlberg line was extended to Lindau in 1872, and the two lines meet at a junction at the North end of the embankment. Being the shore of the lake, a road naturally runs across, and this means we have a four-track-wide level crossing. But it's more complex than that: the crossing is also a crossroads, with a street arriving smack in the middle of the railway junction (on the left in the picture below). For this reason, the crossing requires human supervision, from the hut in the picture above, and is the first example of a manually operated crossing that I can remember seeing.

When the signal is given to the attendants, they start by ringing the warning bells slowly, before picking up speed and the barriers coming down once the crossing is clear. Another clue for a lack of automation is simply how far ahead the barriers come down. While it's no Higashi-Yodogawa (link to a video showing the crossing closed for up to 40 minutes at a time, though this crossing was re-designed in 2019 and is no longer the bottleneck it once was), it's still signposted that you might be better off using an alternate route!

Shorter barrier closing times to Lindau-Insel left. Waiting times of up to 15 minutes here!

The Insel embankment junction is one corner of the Lindau triangle, linking Insel, Reutin and Aeschach stations. Express trains like the EuroCity Express between Munich and Zürich skip Insel, while other regional trains start and Reutin, turn around and Insel and continue through Aeschach towards Kempten. Trains from Friedrichshafen in Germany, Bludenz in Austria or Romanshorn in Switzerland, will typically terminate at Insel, meaning that one can spot trains from three countries on the embankment!