Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

It's Monday the 17th of June and I'm on the train again.

But the great thing is I'm not on my own.

I'm with my friend Stephen Olive.

We are on the 1224 from Carlo Vivari through to, well it goes eventually to Prague. But you're not going all the way, aren't you? No, we're only going as far as Novo Cidoli. And then we're going down the branch to lock it. Now, when you say we, tell us who we are and what you're doing. This is a group of railway enthusiasts from the RCTS in the UK. Which stands for? Railway Correspondence and Travel Society,

a society founded in 1928.

Freika, you weren't a founder member? No, I joined in 1978.

Tell us what the idea is then of this trip?

We get a group of people who are interested in travelling around and each year we book a location,

meet up and have a rover ticket and travel around the country looking at different lines

and travelling on different trains and some of them might even have a beer or two.

Okay, well, I understand that you're staying in Pulsin, the home of

Larga. So I presume that also features somewhere in the adventure. We visited there on Wednesday

evening. It's only a five-minute walk from our hotel. Very well planned. Tell us what's so

interesting about Czech railways to you. I think compared to a lot of the Western countries, it hasn't modernised as much as it did.

So you have a lot of old branch lines that in the Western Europe would have been closed.

You've got older types of trains.

You're going through the modernisation period at the moment. So the train we're on

is very modern and some of the trains we've travelled on are very ancient, 40, 50 years old. So

you have the two contrasts. You're also in a beautiful part of the world, Bohemia, the western part

of the Czech Republic. It is and that's part of the enjoyment, travelling on the trains.

You get to look out over all the different countriesides.

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