Trainspotting at Montpellier
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on 2024-12-14 to 2024-12-15, this fox travelled to Montpellier, in the south of France. it visited the train station and took some photos. after seeing Δ-44203's post about arriving into Montpellier Saint-Roch, it wanted to share some of them!
none of those photos are edited, so they may not look very good. this one will probaly come back at some point™ to edit them.
this station really looks nice, it even ate a rather nice meal in one of the restaurants inside of it.
this one loves the TGV Atlantique and especially it's power car. it's old and its curves look amazing. unfortunately it didn't get inside of one yet (only Euroduplexes), but they're still fairly common so who knows :3
it also is very normal around Scharfenberg couplers :3
freight trains were actually surprisingly rare here, but luckily this fox caught this one!
a bunch of trains kissing >.<
- two TGV Atlantique (France's last-gen high speed train)
- two TGV Duplex (the french current-gen high speed train)
- two TERs (regional trains)
that's kinda gay
this one is a TER (literally regional express transport) train. they are managed by the french region in which they travel. Montpellier is in the Occitania region and they branded its transit service liO.
fun fact: this fox got its SDR out for a few minutes in the station to see what was going on. train operators actually use GSM-R encrypted radios to communicate, so it wasn't able to listen in, but it was fun seeing what was emitting there regardless. also a good thing to know, the french people is as a whole very scared of terrorist attacks and generally suspect behviors, so this one definitely needed to hide its antenna in its backpack to avoid suspicion from train cops and other travellers. it doesn't really want to explain why it's in the middle of a train station with a USB dongle attached to a big antenna to a very fancy couple of lads in uniforms with bulletproof vests and assault rifles.
this one actually got told off by said railway cops because it was taking videos of a train and went too far down the platform (still within the barriers set at the ends of them, so technically still in the platform). just to get an idea of how paranoid they are.
it also went to the xmas market. we didnt end up buying anything, and instead nearly had a panic attack due to how crowded the place was. in true french fashion, we had to wait for something like 20 minutes in line to get our bag checked (because of terrorism prevention measures). our bags were barely checked though, so we could've easily slipped in illegal items regardless. lol.
it had a lot of fun. it will definitely do more trainspotting and most more pictures in the future.
