Xmas/New Year Competition – No. 12

The last mystery location. Satellite photo courtesy Google Maps.

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After a record 7 weeks – BTWT competitions usually drag out for much longer – we have reached the very last round. Starting on 8 December as our ‘Christmas Competition’, the contest played 7 rounds in 2011, and then morphed into our ‘Xmas/New Year Competition’ for another 5 rounds in January.

Today’s round is not helped by the lack of any high resolution image of the area in Google Map ‘satellite view’. The location has been deliberately chosen because it is so confusing. If you look carefully, you will see standard gauge lines, narrow gauge lines, and what could be either! As throughout the rest of this competition, the first person to identify the the area correctly gets the point.

Location No.11 stumped everybody apart from Inzynier. He writes,

From your clue about following steam trains, I first thought of Gniezno, as I remember chasing steam by car along here, and the line runs in the same sort of orientation, but there’s no matching location.  Sroda runs in the wrong direction.

By the time I started visiting the sugar beet lines, steam trains had disappeared.  But I remember driving out from Kruszwica with the railway running almost alongside the road before curving away near the entrance to a farm, which is the location of this photo.  I think I may have some video (certainly some still photos) taken from this location during the period between 1996 and 2002.

Spot on! Inzynier kindly did dig up his photos and found two glorious autumn evening sunlight pictures taken exactly at the No. 11 location in October 1996. Given the flat wagon, box van and the odd passenger coach I would guess this is a mixed P.W. / sugar beet train bringing home the track gang from a day’s work sorting out a few rough places. I passed through here in the early 1970s and caught sight of a steam-hauled train quite by chance.

West bound train near Kruszwica, October 1996. Photo Inzynier.

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Kruszwica Railway, the same train a while later. Photo Inzynier.

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Google Maps ‘slippy map’ view of location No. 11