Harz Day 4 As mentioned in yesterday's blog, all Schierke - Brocken trains have been cancelled for 2 days due to high winds. It just so happened that this was the first day of the tip that the the summit of the Brocken was clear. In the first photo, it's above the bunker of the loco on the right (just to the right of the lamp on the water column). This is what it looks like zoomed in. The railway approaches the summit from left to right and then goes round the back in a spiral before reaching the summit on this side. Some of the structures are remnants of the Russian listening post that once occupied the summit I caught the first train up the hill at 0855 in quite sunny weather. On the trains are a lot of posters explaining how the commercial pine forests are being allowed to return to nature. Many of the fir trees caught a disease a few years back and died and in many places we are between phase 2 and 3 (second and third from left) in the circular illustrations at the bottom of the poster. The forest should rejuvenate as mixed woodlands, much more open to light and with different native tree species of differing heights. See https://phys.org/news/2019-09-germany-climate-stressed-trees- catastrophe-bugs.html Key quote at the end of the article: Environment Minister Svenja Schulze said the new funds should not be used to plant even more heat-susceptible spruce forests, but rather more resilient and neutral mixed woodlands. "We now have the opportunity to begin an era of ecological forest conversion that promotes climate-stable and near-natural mixed forests," she said. As no trains were going all the way up the Brockem, on arrival in Schierke, special arrangements were in place to send the trains back from here. This is how they did it. The first train arrives at the up platform 1 and the loco runs round. Just prior to next train arrival, the first train propels uphill clear of the far points. It waits for second train to arrive and run round. The first train then pulls back into the station on the down platform 2 for the return to DAH in its normal path from Brocken. Just prior to the arrival of the third train, the second train propels uphill clear of the station. Train 3 arrives at platform 1 and train 1 departs downhill to DAH from Platform 2. Train 3 runs round and then train 2 pulls into platform 2. And so the shuffle continues. As I was on the first train, it was around a 90 minute wait until my train could go down after two more trains had arrived and theoretically my train could have been up to the top of the Brocken and back down to Schierke in that time. We'd do it differently in the UK as we use tokens on single track railways to make sure that only one train is in a section at a time. It Germany, they don't use token but maintain safety by sticking to an established timetable no matter what. That would be why we had to wait for 2 more trains to arrive before we could go down. In Britain, we could have gone down earlier as long as we had the token to show the section was clear. A decision to issue the token could have been made by phone call between the two signalmen at Schierke and Drei Annen Hohne. The special arrangements meant that two trains were waiting to go down from Schierke where normally one would be going down and the other going up. I returned to the outer edge of Wernigerode, got off at Steinerne Renne and walked back from there. On the way, I saw a down train on the short section of street running near Hochschule Harz (Harz High School). The Westerntor Turm (Western Gate Tower) is the last remaining town gate. The railway passes across the centre of this photo. Really! See next page. Another day of restricted trains tomorrow - and it's my birthday! John Raby 22 February 2020.