Saturday morning was one as I have had many times in this part of Poland. Getting up rather early, no breakfast and than … waiting in the cold for things to come. We were waiting in Szreniawa for the 09.05 steam train from Poznań to Wolsztyn. On this particular railway line the last regular steam trains of Europe are running on a daily basis. And that fact attracts lots of photographers (and in summer also lots of “normal” tourists, i.e. people who are not hard core steam train fans). Since the steam locomotives are not in a perfect condition the engines are replaced by diesel locomotives. But today everything was running according to the plan, after 20 minutes waiting the train rolled into the small station for a brief stop. We followed the steam train down to Wolsztyn, the former german Wollstein, and had a brief look in the locomotive depot. It was already around noon and we still hadn’t eaten anything apart from a dutch snack, so it was about time to eat something.


The class OL49 hauled train leaves Szreniawa


The same train at the semaphore in Rakoniewice


OL49 7 with its two coaches in Rakoniewice


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The lunch was taken in a restaurant where I usually have dinner with other railway photographers. Though the official name of the restaurant is “Smakocz” we call it “The Police Station”, the latter is adjacent to the restaurant. The waitress remembered me and asked immediately how many buns we wanted to have with our scrambled eggs.

Around 13:00 we left Wolsztyn, because we still had one place to visit before we were to make the last kilometers back to Berlin. On the south eastern skirts of the small city of Swiebodzin a priest had a giant statue of Jesus erected (see also here). He has saved money for years and years in order to build it. The statue is said to be even larger than the one in Rio de Janeiro. Since the statue is brand new we were eager to see it. It is huge and one can argue about how beautiful it is. The size of the building crane gives kind of an impression how large the statue really is. I am sure it will become a big tourist attraction.


Larry shows that the statue really isn’t THAT big (variation on the Pisa theme)


The statue with the building crane behind it


A detail of the statue


Very practical, there is a shopping mall including parking place in front of the statue

From Swiebodzin it is just a small ride back to Berlin. We got briefly stuck in a traffic jam near Rzepin, due to the construction of the last part of the A2 highway towards the german-polish border. We were lucky, we only stood for 15 minutes. The traffic jam from the border towards Rzepin was way worse, over 10 kilometers of traffic jam … So next time I will enter Poland I will avoid this road.

At the end of the afternoon we got back to Berlin, safe and sound. We had had a terrific journey through Poland and Lithuania!