When I was a kid growing up back East, my parents would bring me to a place called Edaville Railroad. It's a theme park now but, back then, the main attraction was a train that went through a track in cranberry bogs. During the holidays, they turned those bogs into a sort of winter wonderland with bright lights and festive sculptures. Passengers were the audience, and the decorated bogs became a kind of "stage."

I remember it being a lot of fun.

Well, for three days in late August, a group of artists in Germany took this idea to a whole new and incredibly impressive level. I love this so much!

Over 500 volunteers and residents in the "Bewegtes Land" art project entertained passengers with a super fun and quirky art performance, all happening along the train's nearly 19-mile route.

Watch the video to see how they surprised their moving audience along the way.

The route went from Jena to Naumburg, a quiet area in the Saale valley's countryside not known for tourists.

All I have to say is that someone really needs to do a U.S. version of this. Pretty please.

(TwistedSifter) Read the rest

Marilyn sez, "The 750-mile Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway that will connect the oil-rich Caspian Sea region to Turkey and beyond is being built to grease a trade boom, transporting European goods east and petroleum products west across the southern Caucasus. Once completed, by 2012, the railway will begin at the Azerbaijani capital of Baku and travel through the Georgian city of Tbilisi, before carrying on to Kars, a Turkish post town on the southwestern lip of the Caucasus region."

... says N. Ahmet KuÅŸhanoğlu, the Turkish deputy director of transport in charge of railways. "Turkey's face is turned westward since two centuries." Now Turkey is looking east in order to make itself indispensable to the West. Once the Marmaray rail tunnel opens in 2013 beneath the Bosporus in Istanbul, trains from Baku will reach all the way to London. "It is easy to see that this railway shall serve Europe also," says KuÅŸhanoğlu."

But not everyone in the region stands to benefit: "...the BTK railway is the result of an alliance between Turkey, Georgia, and Azerbaijan; neighboring Armenia was deliberately left out of the party. And like the pipeline, this east-west corridor will provide an alternative to going through Russia to the north or Iran to the south. It is a more than $600-million project of economic development, social engineering, or shrewd geopolitics, depending on your point of view, which in the southern Caucasus shifts as quickly as the snow that obscures the mountain road."

Eurasian Railroad (Thanks, Marilyn!)

(Image: Alex Webb/National Geo)