This is a memorial I stumbled across outside a church in Nottinghamshire a year ago. There’s not a great deal of information on the memorial itself but thanks to the efforts of a number of people who have been diligently researching the loss of Lancaster W4270 with...
If you are anywhere near the city of Chartres (SW of Paris) on 17 September, you should see the Festival of Lights (Fête de la Lumière) that night. It marks the climax of the 2016 season (16 Apr – 08 Oct) which sees many (27) of Chartres...
For some nationalities, like us Brits, it’s a little hard to understand the role of France’s customs force, les Douanes. We have customs officers standing around at airports & ports, checking bags, opening shipping containers, and so on, but they are viewed as bureaucrats or government officials....
With innovative companies like Saab, Bofors, Volvo and Scania, the Swedes have come at engineering & design from a different angle to everybody else.
What's not to like about the pure application of turbines, gears and cogs?
Armémuseum , the Swedish Army Museum, is a traditional capital city style museum in an impressive historic building in the centre of Stockholm, but although there’s lots of interesting exhibits & displays, I found it a little disappointing. It’s a shame, because they really have gone to some...
With over 200 armoured vehicles on permanent display, and another 680 in its inventory, the Musée des Blindés Saumur, has the largest collection of armoured vehicles in the world*. It’s been on my list of museums to visit for some time and I wasn’t disappointed. Its roots...
I’ve long meant to pay Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s maritime masterpiece a visit, and I wasn’t disappointed. The Potted History Brunel must have been a commandingly persuasive man because somehow he got the Great Western Steamship Company to approve two serious departures from normal shipbuilding techniques for their...
Five minutes into our day long ‘Mountains and Mines’ trip*, Paul Harris delivered the bad news – we wouldn’t be able to go down the coal mine today. Dang! It was to have been the highlight (well, lowlight technically) of the trip. I’d tried once before. A...
A small 400 sq metre museum is being added to the Thiepval Memorial Visitor Centre in Picardy, France. The opening will be a prelude to the Centenary commemorations of the Battle of the Somme, the iconic battle on the 1st July 1916 which was the bloodiest day for...
Given Berlin’s Cold War role as the “capital of spies”, it seems only fitting that it should now host the only museum in Germany dedicated to the dark world of espionage. The surprise is that it has taken this long. The Spy Museum, located in Potsdamer Platz,...
Truthfully? the Soane Museum is not somewhere I would have visited normally. Art history, or in this case, architecture history, is outside my core interest zone. To make matters worse, the visit did not start well, and I was irritated from the off. I don’t like queuing,...
This is a niche blog about technically-minded travel. It reflects my own interests in the mechanical, technical, historical, engineering, transport and military world.
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