Flat, flat, flat

Why does it take the best part of three hours to travel by train between Amsterdam and Brussels? It doesn't look that far on the map.

Mind you, this Intercity train does a lot more stopping and travelling sedately than I was expecting. I probably could have paid extra for the high-speed Thalys train, but actually it's quite nice to see some countryside. Not to mention occasional train-set style sidings and marshalling yards, with locos and wagons waiting to head off across Europe to who-knows-where.

Flat wagons, open wagons, covered wagons, car transporter wagons, gravel hopper wagons, wagons of every colour and marking, graffiti-covered passenger cars, strange Dutch passenger trains with curious 747-type cockpit-bulges in the roof. It's the whole Hornby, and then some.

Fields, dykes, polders, other railway lines, bridges, highways and byways, rivers, container barges, gas barges, Friesian cows, football stadiums, churches, level crossings. You get to see everything when the country is so flat. There's an occasional gradient on the track, but that's to take us over a bridge or causeway, not because the land is hilly. All through Holland and Belgium.

Oh, and I'm particularly excited* to be on a corridor train, in a compartment. Just like when I was Interrailing back years ago. In fact, I might well have taken this line, thinking about it.

*Not that you'd notice. You might wonder why I'm guffawing frequently, but that's because I'm reading Paul O'Grady's At My Mother's Knee.