Pictures and the story behind

[Mattes]

The picture from here I had taken in the park of Schloss Rosenau (Rosenau castle), close to the town of Coburg in southern Germany. There is an interesting story behind that place, affecting not only Germans, but also Britons, French people and US-Citizens.

Schloss Rosenau:

In the city center of Coburg there is the main castle, Schloss Ehrenburg:

The statue in front of this castle shows Ernst I., Herzog zu Sachsen, Coburg und Gotha (Ernest I., Duke of Saxony, Coburg and Gotha). His younger brother Leopold became King of the Belgians in 1831, his sister Juliane was Russian Grand Duchess and his sister Victoire was the mother of the British Queen Victoria. When his father died in 1806, he succeeded him as duke on December 9, but was initially unable to take up the reins of government as the country was occupied by Napoleonic troops and under French administration. His son Albert (1819–1861) married in 1840 Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Ireland (1819–1901). so it was no surprise that Queen Victoria visited the two castles many times.

The window left of the statue under the balcony was her sleeping room. This room is home to a technical sensation, at the time: Directly from the first World’s Fair in London 1851 a newly created water closet was installed in her sleeping room.

The first water closet was presented at this fair in London in 1851. 800,000 Londoners queued up to be allowed to use it for a penny. “To spend a penny” is still a euphemism for going to the toilet in the UK today.

At the end of WW II the almost undestroyed Coburg was occupied by American soldiers. A special force searched the castle to see if any works of art had been stolen during the Nazi era. But everything was still in place, fortunately. Only the painting of a descendant of Ernst I, who sympathized with the Nazis, was shot in the head.

Visiting the two castels took me two hours of hard core listening to the guides. Also they paid strong attention that nobody was taking photos…

If you have a picture with a story behind, please share. Maybe someone is interested.

[Tim (Tim Cuthbertson)]

One of my favorite pieces of related information is that the British royal family changed their surname from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor in order to present a more English than German identity to the British people. (I hope I stated that correctly.)

[ggbutcher (Glenn Butcher)]

The rest of the 1800s after the American Civil War saw the expansion of settlement into the western half of the continent. The transcontinental railroad built between Omaha and San Francisco cut the transit time from six months to two weeks, and opened settlement all along the way. While the Colorado territory wasn’t directly on the route, entrepreneurs like Gen. William Palmer built railroads off the main line to serve booming industry like silver mining. In the mountains, cutting railroad grades was expensive, so Palmer particularly settled on narrow gauge rights of way, 3 feet wide instead of the burgeoning standard of 4 feet 8 1/2 inches.

The Denver & Rio Grande railroad was Palmer’s first venture, narrow-gauge headed south from Denver with the ultimate distant terminus of Mexico City. He didn’t make it past Santa Fe, New Mexico, but instead built lines west in to the mountains when silver was discovered there. One of those lines departed Walsenburg, Colorado, and wound it’s way through the San Juan Mountains to Durango, and then some.

Fast-forward to the 1960s, this particular line still ran a regular freight and passenger schedule in its original 3-foot width, with steam locomotives no less. Various one-off traffic kept it going long past the time most other such railroads went under or at least standard-gauged, but the economics of such a labor-intensive operation ultimately caught up with it in the late '60s.

Witnessing this proceeding, a few folk from Colorado and New Mexico set out to preserve as much of this railroading heritage as they could. What they finally came up with was nothing less than a minor miracle, a bi-state commission to run a 64-mile segment of the Walsenburg-Durango line from Antonito, Colorado to Chama, New Mexico. For about a half-a-million dollars, the two states purchased the line and whatever equipment the railroad had not already scrapped and chartered that commission to run it as a tourist line. The early days were sparse, only one of the locomotives was operable, and they had to cobble passenger cars from cut-up boxcars, complete with plastic cafeteria chairs.

They managed to keep things going relying on a bit of ingenuity and the spectacular scenery through which the railroad ran. Eventually they built an operation that runs daily from both ends to a lunch stop in the middle of nowhere. It takes redundant equipment to reliably service that schedule, so priority was given to restoring to operation as many of the old locomotives as possible.

The picture at the start of this missive shows five hot locomotives in front of the engine house in Chama, in October of 2015. This feat had been accomplished earlier in that day, where they assembled these machines that had been painstakingly restored on tracks side-by-side for a picture. I got there too late to see that, but all five locomotives had been marshalled to the engine house lead tracks where this picture was taken. I think I prefer this scene, which would be how the old railroad would have kept these machines ready to service traffic.

A long string of improbable stories…

[martin.scharnke]

This pair of doors comprise a bronze casting of the 95 Theses which Martin Luther posted on a previous door in this location of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. The date: 31 October 1517, usually deemed the beginning of the Reformation.

OK, so what? You can find this out on Wikipedia.

I went with my family on a pilgrimage to Europe in 2017 - 500 years later - and on Sunday 27 August we attended a church service here. Then my daughter - at the time aged 14 - posed with a hammer at these very doors, to the bemusement of the clergy greeting exiting worshippers!

Should mention this is a big deal for me because I am a Lutheran pastor.