not sure if strikethrough works on this forum software, although it does appear on others, especially forums about computer science/programming.
That it still exists at all in the 21st century is a hangover from the old terminals of the 1980s/1990s and the Internets links with military/security related operations; any changes to something critical like kernel code had to be justified and accounted for (such as patching a kernel against crashes caused by a students code going wrong 😉 )
It is easier to get trains from DE to AT and CH as well as SE and NO as electric locos use the same type of electricity supply (15 000V 16.667 16.7 Hz; elsewhere in Europe it is 25 000 V 50 Hz). There must have been some logical reason for this but means that when trains cross other borders they either have to be diesel locos or multi voltage trains (which do exist but are more expensive, and each EU country has slightly different rules about how much diesel exhaust fumes are permitted from trains.
A friend in AT who likes trains (and lives in a large house up a mountain) is building a “miniature” railway leading from the coal cellar all the way to her garden. This is not simply a large model train set (of the kind still sold in UK and DE) but is capable of running several wagons with about 500 kilos of coal on each one and eventually will have an electric loco capable of transporting a group of people to the garden.
The run for the coal wagon is 15m long (the entire garden is much bigger). She hand built all the rails and the wagon, and explained that the only reason she wasn’t hauling 2 tonnes of coal (in 20 kilo sacks) was due to hurting her back during her military service. It is normal for girls in North European countries (including Scotland) to have hobbies like this.
