Our trip to Copenhagen by train was the only thing we couldn’t book from Australia. We tried, but couldn’t. That almost prevented us from going to Ronneby at one stage, which would have been a huge shame, since we had our best time in Ronneby, and once we were in Ronneby, buying tickets couldn’t have been easier. Especially since Brinck bought them, with LittleB’s money, it was really simple.

Something that made it easier still, was that we bought first class tickets. First class is not very expensive, I think we only paid about $78 each to go from Ronneby to Copenhagen. We didn’t think that was expensive, but the woman in the shop at the train station selling the tickets said she hardly ever sells first class tickets. When we were on the train, LittleB and I had the first class carriage to ourselves most of the way. There was a bloke sitting across from us for some of the time. You’ll see this on the videos. Meanwhile, the second class carriage was full, and some of the time people had to stand. Weird, as I said it wasn’t expensive to go first class. Pay the extra and get a seat, people!

I took some photos as we were leaving, just 22 photos of Ronneby, but then I switched to video. The photos are here: [Link]

The first video below shows scenes out the window and goes for about 11 minutes. The train ride went for a little over 3 hours, I should have got more video than this. However, most of what I didn’t film was the same sort of thing. Watching this video gives a good idea of what we were looking at. It is not really for people who have to watch their download limits, it is 116mb. Although that is not really huge, it’s hardly one of the world’s great train journeys (we enjoyed it though, since we were happy to be there experiencing it), you can wait until it comes out on DVD.

The next video you might like to see. There is a bridge that goes over the water between Sweden and Denmark. There is the road on top of the bridge for normal vehicles, but the train goes underneath the road. You’ll see all the steel girders out the window of the train which sometimes confused the autofocus on my video camera, especially at the start. I should have remembered my video camera has manual focus, and set it. In the end though, you can see some things a little better than with the naked eye because of the zoom on the lens. Seeing any of these videos on a large screen though shows a lot more detail than what you see in these small sized blog videos.

The bridge leaves Sweden at the city of Malmö and goes out to a man made island between Sweden and Denmark. On the island, the road and train track goes into a tunnel for the rest of the way to Copenhagen which is just on the other side of the water. The video shows all of the time on the bridge, but cuts short the journey through the tunnel (since there was nothing to see out the window) then resumes when we exit. We were looking forward to this part of the trip since we had seen it on Google Earth – the bridge, island and windmills. You might hear LittleB say something like “We saw that on Google” near the start, she was talking about the windmills in the ocean.

There is an annoying flickering square on the video which sometimes appears. I don’t know what it is, hopefully you can put up with it. It is not in the original footage, nor is it on the .mov file I have made for DVD, it only shows up on this flash video file I rendered for the blog. I tried to re-render the file a couple of times, but the square still shows up in this video clip. Sorry about that, flashing square won’t be on the DVD. Here is the video (48mb):

That’ll be all.