When the idea for the Alpine Railway Book started to take shape, I wanted to make sure that I would be able to turn my ideas into reality. In the late summer of 2018, I took a few photographs along the Gotthard and Bernina lines, with the main part of the photography to follow between 2019 and summer 2021.

The basic idea was based on the views of the Furka steam railway that I had taken while working for the book “Passbilder – Landschaften der Alpenpässe” and photographs of railway landscapes in Canada.

Ideas develop peu à peu. When I photographed the construction of the Gotthard Base Tunnel in 2010, I also looked into the construction of the Gotthard railway. I wanted to understand the history of the railway in detail. I hiked and looked at the landscapes of the railways even back then. Up at the Lukmanier Pass, I saw and photographed this view: the base tunnel runs right underneath these mountains.

In the beginning I had the idea to photograph parts of the infrastructure of the alpine railways in addition to the railway landscapes in the style of my Lightworks like this photograph of a locomotive in Leadville, Colorado. I did light the reversing star of the Vinschgaubahn in Mals, but the motif did not make it into the Alpenbahnen book due to lack of space.

In retrospect, I had to take a few involuntary detours because I was hoping and curious whether there might not also be an interesting view of the railway line from the opposite mountain. It was not always „fun“ and „easy going“. How could I have known that I would need much more time for these photographs than was comparably the case with the „Alpine Passes“ book. Since the trains were to be seen in the pictures, the right lighting conditions had to be available at the right vantage point just as the trains were passing. Good planning, preparation and flexibility were an absolute must; but also supplemented by that element that every person needs who takes photographs in different seasons and weather changes, with trains that are not on schedule or sometimes unknown times of travel: Luck.

When I had gathered various facts after the last shots I had to realise to my great astonishment that all these walks along the tracks and through the mountain worlds added up to a good 1500 kilometres in the course of the two and a half years. That is the equivalent of walking one and a half times the length of Germany. If someone had told me that at the beginning…but no need to worry – it didn’t make me an athlete.

But there were also tasks that I couldn’t do, or better: shots that were simply not possible to make. How could I photograph the railways to the Jungfraujoch or the Zugspitze mountain? The last kilometres of both run in tunnels. The Laas Marble Railway and the Achensee Railway were closed down during my work with an uncertain future, but the French La Mure Railway awoke from a long slumber.
I had photographed the Zillertal, Pinzgau and Aosta Valley railways, but these could not be included due to lack of space and because they are not explicitly mountain railways. The Lauterbrunnen-Mürren mountain railway also no longer found a place in the book.
In spring 2020, the worldwide Corona pandemic hit and no one really knew how travel in the Alps would develop. The winter months were lost due to travel restrictions, and I would have liked to photograph more winter photographs. So Corona has also left its mark on this book, just as it has influenced all our lives since then.

At the beginning of the book is a quote by the great musician Tom Waits. He wrote the song for Johnny Cash’s first „American Recordings“ album (1994) and later released it on his own collection „Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards“.

Trains in this and most lyrics are metaphors on one’s own life, chances for a different/better life, joy, sorrow, death, depression, farewell, redemption, salvation, human greed, etc.

On my journeys to the Alps, I always took a pile of songs from my analogue music collection on my iPod and so, little by little, a list of music pieces on the theme of trains and railways emerged, which I would like to share with you.
It is an absolutely personal list of songs that I like extremely well. Music history really has some treasures to offer.
It is no wonder that I have mainly chosen pieces by those musicians whom I have been listening to since my youth and whose songs have accompanied me in so many aspects of my life – and now also in a book about railways in the Alps.

Of course, these songs have little to do with the actual subject of the book about Alpine Railways, but after all, the songs are more or less about trains and railways and that’s not that bad.
Besides, the songs might appeal to some and can make a small contribution to complementing one’s own musical taste, maybe even please someone. Who knows, and it certainly won’t hurt.

Tom Waits has written over two dozen songs about trains, Johnny Cash sang dozens, Bruce Springsteen conjured up beautiful images („… a freight train running through the middle of my head….“), the Cowboy Junkies sang a beautiful ballad about structural change, Element of Crime wrote the most eloquent German-language song on this subject and the trio Ambros-Tauchen-Prokopetz sang the most beautiful German-language ballad.
Especially the melancholic songs always inspire me – I can hardly escape these sad songs by gifted performers like Marianne Faithfull, Van Morrison or the Eels. One of my favourite pieces on the subject are the fabulous instrumentals by Warren Ellis, Michael Nyman, Brian and Roger Eno, Steve Reich and the Kronos Quartet, and last but not least Kraftwerk.
Not to be missed are the classics by Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin and Glenn Miller and the many pieces from the history of Blues Music (including „Love in Vain“ interpreted by the Rolling Stones or „Mystery Train“).
„Princess of the Night“ is a classic of the heavy metal genre, but the song by the British band Saxon is not a hymn to a seductive beauty of the night, but to the railway.
But sometimes the railway is more of a minor matter, describes a scenery or a beautiful impression has stayed with me („Waterloo Sunset“ by the Kinks, the intro of „Berlin“ from the band Ideal, „Ohio“ by Low Anthem or „Kindling“ by Elbow).

I’ve come up with a list of about 300 songs, and it takes you nearly a day to listen to them.
For the sake of digital simplicity, I created my own Spotify playlist. Unfortunately, for reasons best known, Neil Young’s songs are no longer available there. But „Southern Pacific“ and „Train of Love“ belong at the top of my collection.

There is also a detailed list of Train songs on Wikipedia and it is very worthwhile to investigate further there.
I remember very well one Saturday morning in Summer 2019 up on the Oberalp Pass near Andermatt, when the wind carried the sounds of alphorn players over to me and I thought to myself, that sounds like a tribute to this beautiful railway line. Maybe it already exists somewhere?
If you know of any pieces, especially from the non-English-speaking world, please feel free to send me an email.