An American Railfan in Poland: Train to Belarus, 1 of 2

In the year 2000 my wife and I decided to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary by spending a month, more or less on our own, in Poland. I say we were "more or less on our own" because we did spend the middle two weeks traveling with our Polish pen pals Piotr and Ewa and their 15 year old son Maicek. (Ewa teaches English as a foreign language, Piotr understands it well enough that he could laugh at some of my jokes, and Maicek already had enough English skills to get by). They, like us, are a railfan family. We were also joined by our friends Ted and Kay from Alamosa, CO. They are not railfans, but I think that caused them more distress than it caused us.

After returning home I started telling people about what a great time we had in Poland and the responses almost invariably were along the line of "I didn't know you were Polish" and "what could you possibly find of interest in Poland to justify spending a whole month there?"

Just for the record, neither of us have any Polish heritage, we did not speak or understand a word of Polish (well, OK, we knew pierogi and kielbasa) and we had never been outside the US before (well, OK, we've been to Canada a couple of times). Also, while I knew that there was still some mainline and narrow gauge steam to be found in Poland, this trip really was not about trains or railfanning. Only 12 of the 28 days were spent on or near trains (not counting the trams that you just naturally use to get around in the cities) and of those, five involved intercity train travel. Poland is a small country, about the size of the state of Colorado, but there is so much to see and do there that we were easily able to fill our time.

I started posting my series "An American Railfan in Poland" as a way of introducing Poland as a travel destination to my fellow American railfans. In this series, I try to include a little background on the history, culture, and natural beauty of the country as I understand them (and I am certainly no expert) and to share those things that I found interesting. Funny thing though, this series seems to have attracted more Polish subscribers than Americans.

In the best Star Wars tradition, these movie clips are being created in a totally random order. Chronologically, in terms of the trip, this one should have followed "An American Railfan in Poland: Elk, Pt. 2" which was posted about a year ago.

Incidentally, I returned to Poland in 2003 with my son Selby for another three weeks with more of a railfan focus. Some movie clips from that trip are included in this series and others are in the "Wolsztyn Experience" series.

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• Bialowieza
• Belarus
• Bohoniki
• cab_ride
• diesel
• forest
• Hajnowka
• Orthodox_Church
• PKP
• Passenger_train
• Poland
• Tatars
• trains

[grounded80]

I am surprised you even made it out of the Airport when you arrived in Poland. 3km are not 5 miles rather 2 miles. Good video but that just ruined it

[gothpapa]

I took a taxi from the airport and fortunately the taxi driver knew his km's from his miles. As for the three mile difference, the conversion table I used must have been defective, because I never make mistakes.

[vitrobart]

It's a great movie, Gothpapa!!! Do you have more movies or photos from Hajnowka train station?

[KFCJones]

I'm reading up on Poland and Polish history, and I'm a locomotive engineer, so there was alot for me to like here! The commentary is good, too - are you related to David Letterman? ;)

[szafek3]

You must see a museum in Sochaczew in Poland.

We have here a lot of old trains.

[CRACOVIA1515]

Maciek*

[SillyGrandpa]

1 mile = 1.6 km

[EisenbahnfanMuenchen]

This time has the PKP deleted many connections , so it is not so much traffic there as it was then ...

[Adam386]

Hajnówka cool :D

[Cielepa]

Hehe, I live in Hajnowka :)