User:Sapfan

My name is Jan Pešula. I was born in Prague, Czech Republic. For the last 26 years, I have been working as an IT specialist on SAP projects. I enjoy setting up the system (hence my user name) and in the past, I used to discuss SAP - related topics on Sapfans forum.

One of the benefits of my job is, that the same software is used globally - which has given me a chance to work in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Belgium, Guatemala, the United Kingdom and Denmark for several weeks, months or even years. At present, I am splitting my time between Dortmund and Copenhagen, but you will almost surely find me somewhere else once the current project is over.

Another passion of mine are railroads, especially traveling on freight or exotic lines. The industry is changing rapidly - tasks are being automated, freight traffic is concentrating to a few hubs and routes, governments are losing patience with unprofitable lines. All this results in modernization of main routes and closures of secondary ones. While traveling, I try to keep a record of current operations on freely licensed photographs such as these (not all under this link are mine), to save the memory for the posterity.

In Wikimedia Commons, I mainly contribute my own travel photos, mostly focused on secondary railway lines in Europe or places "off the beaten track". When not traveling, I like searching, editing and placing public-domain portraits and other illustrations from digitized books and magazines (e.g., Category:Humoristické listy or Category:Zlatá Praha). Many thanks to librarians from the Czech Academy of Sciences, the National Library in Prague and the Austrian National Library, who have made this effort possible by scanning millions of pages of old literature!

You can see the results from both activities in the small selection on this page, or all of them in a gallery.

Enjoy Wikimedia, and if you want, take a look at travelogues with many pictures from Europe and Central America on my personal web site (last updated in 2007).

Charter train tours

• Győr 2023 (rail lines around Zalaegerszeg, Győr and Esztergom in Hungary)
• Lubuskie Zakamarki 2019 (Lubuskie Województwo in Poland, mainly Jankowa Żagańska — Przewóz)
• KŽC summer tour to Slovakia, Poland and Ukraine 2018
• KŽC tour to Ukraine and Romania 2018, a trip featuring charter trains on two lesser-known narrow-gauge railways
• KŽC tour to Ukraine and Romania 2016, a previous weak-long trip focused on narrow-gauge museum railways and combining regular and chartered trains
• KŽC tour around Slovakia and Hungary 2015, a traditional event
• Hidden Corners of Lower Silesia 2015 (Dolnośląskie Zakamarki)
• Weekend tour of KŽC in Western Bohemia 2014
• KŽC tour around Slovakia 2014 (Holiday with a historical railcar / Dovolená s motoráčkem)
• Balkan Train Tour 2014 (Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo)
  • Mercia Kosovo Tour 2014 - the core of the trip above
• Weekend with a diesel railcar in Ostrava and Karviná with KŽC, March 2014
• IBSE tour from Neustrelitz, March 2014
• Rail Wonders of Southern Sweden 2013

Other trips

• Two weeks in Cuba, February 2019
• Vacation in Tenerife, December 2013

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  Train station in Velvary, Czech Republic
• 
  San Simón (Maximón) in Zunil, Guatemala
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  Julius Zeyer, Czech writer (by Jan Vilímek)
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  Basilica of Esquipulas, Guatemala
• 
  Former train station in Sibambe, Ecuador
• 
  Railcar on a turntable in Casilda (Trinidad, Cuba)

During the pre-internet era of the 1980s and 1990s and for some time afterwards, I used to collect imprinted stamps and train tickets, mostly from the Czech Republic. Some of these relics of the past have also found their way to Wikimedia Commons:

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  Imprinted stamps from Czechoslovakia and East Germany (1984)
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  Meter stamps from Prague (1989)
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  Train tickets from Poland (1998-2000)
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  Edmonson train tickets from Nigeria (1988)
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  Written train ticket from Czechoslovakia (1988)
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  Baggage ticket of the Czechoslovak Railways (1984)