The Tim Traveller



"I make videos about weird railways, international borders, random other stuff. You'll probably enjoy at least one in four of my videos."

The Tim Traveller is a YouTuber who specializes in short, pithy videos about interesting locations in Europe. Since 2018, Tim (a Brit living in Paris) has been producing a Vlog Series consisting of roughly five- to fifteen-minute segments highlighting interesting, unusual or just plain quirky sites to see around the Continent and in Great Britain. He has an admitted fondness for both mountains and railroads, but his content is by no means limited to them; the subjects of his videos range from the most beautiful sewage pumping station in England to an ironworks-turned-tourist attraction in Germany to a 5,000-year-old dolmen in the backyard of a restaurant in France. Through it all he provides informative and entertaining commentary leavened with a wit that is by turns both dry and Pythonesque.

Unfortunately the COVID-19 pandemic restricted his travels to France (and sometimes just Paris) for much of 2020, but that didn't stop him from exploring some less-than-obvious spots away from the usual tourist haunts.

His YouTube channel can be found here.

He also has a Twitter feed, a Facebook page, and a blog on Blogspot.

Not to be confused with the British comic strip Tim Traveller, serialized in The Beano from 1997 to 2004.

"[German national anthem starts playing] In the end, there was only one country who could take something as mad as this and make it economical, efficient and reliable. And that country was, of course... [German national anthem interrupted with a Record Needle Scratch, map appears on screen] ...France!"
 * Arlen Theory: Invoked in his video for The Least Used Railway Station in France. After spending two minutes over a hiking montage explaining how he determined which rail station in France served the fewest passengers and why he wasn't perfectly certain of his results, he ends by saying the best way he knew of to get the indisputable right answer would be to post the video and wait two minutes for an angry comment to appear correcting his conclusions.
 * Applied Mathematics: In The Disused Railway Where They Tested Rocket Trains Tim describes the idea behind the 1970s-vintage French Aerotrain as "let's take an aeroplane, a racing car, a train and a hovercraft, mix them together, and see what happens" -- with a handy diagram depicting icons of each vehicle type being added together.
 * Audience Participation: His 2020 Mediocre Mountain Challenge, in which -- inspired by his videos where he scaled the highest points in places like The Netherlands that have no high places -- he invited viewers to submit photos and videos of them climbing to the peaks of the least-impressive "mountains" local to them.
 * Similarly his 2021 International Staycation Challenge, in which viewers were invited to provide photos and videos of apparently international locations in their immediate locale.
 * Award Show: He created one for the 2020 Mediocre Mountain Challenge, with winners in a dozen or so different categories.
 * Similarly, he also created one for the 2021 International Staycation Challenge.
 * Bait and Switch: It's not uncommon to for him to pull this, leading the viewer to expect one thing, then concluding somewhere else entirely after a Record Needle Scratch.  For example, from a mid-2021 video on suspended monorails in Germany:


 * Catch Phrase: As Tim himself lampshades in one of his videos, "...we're not here for any of that."
 * Borrowed Catchphrase: When fellow YouTuber Geoff Marshall appears in Tim's video The Disused Railway Where They Tested Rocket Trains, he makes his presence known by providing the catchphrase at a key moment.
 * Clip Art Animation: Has been known to animate artwork and photos of historical figures to present them speaking.
 * Crossover: In early December 2021 with YouTuber Geoff Marshall, known for his "Least-Used Stations" series. Geoff appeared in one of Tim's videos, and Tim appeared in one of Geoff's.
 * Early Installment Weirdness: His first video in this format, Schwebebahn: Why Wuppertal's Trains Are Much Cooler Than Yours, is distinctly different from his later videos.  Its tone is drier, more academic, with only one touch of humor at the very end, and he does not appear in it at all.  As a subtitle on a mid-2021 video notes, "My early voiceovers had all the energy of a sloth on valium".
 * For even earlier installment weirdness, his very first video on YouTube was about climbing the highest point in every county in England; the only thing it has in common with his later videos is the music, which he composed and performed.
 * Filler Episode: He'll gladly admit that some of his videos, such as the second Fake Facades of Paris, are (as he put it) "lockdown content" -- releases created with the limited resources he had available to him during France's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and as such suffer in quality compared to his other videos.
 * The Mountains of Illinois: Invoked tongue-in-cheek with his Mediocre Mountain Challenge, itself spun off from a series of videos in which he visited the highest points in low lands, whose altitude could reach a dizzying tens of feet.  Lampshaded by both Tim and the viewers who submitted their videos when they exaggerated the effort expended in climbing all the way to the tops of these towering peaks.
 * Presenter: Although Tim takes all the footage for his videos with a hand-held camera (and sometimes a drone), he narrates each one, and is almost always on-screen for at least part of each segment.
 * Record Needle Scratch: Frequently paired with Bait and Switch humor.
 * Relax-O-Vision: Invoked in his January 25, 2022 video How A Spectacular Piece Of Pedantry Created An International Enclave. While discussing the 2017 referendum on Catalan independence, he runs a series of landscape images with the caption, "While we discuss this controversial topic please enjoy these calming images of the local countryside".
 * Running Gag: Very often his videos include a bit of narration along the line of "Here we are in beautiful [Town].  It has [extensive list of historical and cultural features]. But of course we're not here for any of that."
 * Travelogue Channel
 * Visual Gag: In the opening credits of every episode:  The show title is initially presented as The Time Traveller over footage of Tim; he then falls out of frame, taking the "E" from "Time" with him to reveal the true name of the series.
 * Vlog Series
 * Well, This Is Not That Trope/Immediate Self Contradiction: in The Giant Old Ironworks Anyone Can Explore (Without Getting in Trouble), he describes visiting the Völklingen Ironworks as all the fun of urban exploration, without the danger, trespassing, or fear of arrest -- "So not very much like urban exploration after all."