Last week Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) took possession of their new 4,000-guest cruise ship during an on board signing ceremony at which ownership was transferred from the (astonishingly efficient) Meyer Werft shipyard (I’m a big fan) to NCL and their respective flags were changed. Norwegian Bliss is...
The Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers (REME) museum re-opened in June last year at MOD Lynham in Wiltshire. The corps has had a museum since 1958. It was originally a small collection located in a few rooms at Moat House in REME’s base at Arborfield outside Reading....
Private railway carriages are not new, but these days the ability to rent one and attach it to a train is rare outside the USA, where they are known as “Private Varnishes”*. Now, Golden Eagle Luxury Trains has introduced the Romanov Suite to its (already) private Golden...
Gulliver’s Gate is a miniature world in Times Square, New York. I love a good modelscape. How did I miss this one? How did I miss this one for a whole year?? It turns out NYC launched its own version of Hamburg’s fabulous Miniatur Wunderland back in...
Virgin Galactic has just successfully tested its new spaceship, Unity. Yesterday’s flight was the first powered flight for a Virgin Galactic spaceship since the fatal accident on a test flight in 2014. VSS Unity took off from their base in the Mojave desert at 8:02am with...
This is an interesting standalone exhibit in one of the outbuildings on the Beaulieu estate (site of the National Motor Museum) in the New Forest. It’s a Welbike – a small, parachuteable, motorbike designed for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in WW2. As the blurb in the...
Bristol’s latest attraction, ‘Being Brunel’, a new museum dedicated to the genius of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was opened to the public this weekend. The £7.2m museum sits on the dockside next to his marine masterpiece, SS Great Britain on Bristol’s Harbourside, and incorporates his Dock Office from...
The home of the Museum of the Infantry Regiments of Berkshire and Wiltshire is The Wardrobe* – one of the splendid 15th century buildings on The Close that surround Salisbury Cathedral. For that reason, and because British Army regiments have a habit of amalgamating, merging, emerging and...
What was the average failure rate of aerial bombs in the Second World War, and whose were better – the USAAF, RAF, Luftwaffe, Russian VVS, Regia Aeronautica, or maybe Japan’s IJAAS? I’m wondering because I came across an interesting statistic in Ian McLachian’s book of Eighth Air...
This year is the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, and that moment finally came with the signing of the Armistice in a railway carriage in the middle of a wood 80 kilometres north east of Paris on 11th November 1918. Yesterday, after...
The long-awaited reopening of The Museum of War and Peace took place in Novion-Porcien in the French Ardennes at the end of last month, in this 100th anniversary year of the conclusion of The First World War. The French Ardennes has been at the heart of European...
This clock in Salisbury Cathedral is thought to be the world’s oldest… that is still working! Once again it was the Dutch who were working at the cutting edge of technology (remember, their engineers were all over the UK at the start of the middle ages building...
Soviet leaders and Pollitt Bureau chiefs had the luxury of travelling around the USSR in style whilst the rest of population were lucky to have any petrol powered transport at their beck and call. Now a fine collection of vehicles from that Communist rule era makes up...
The Grassmayr Bell Foundry in Innsbruck, Austria, is one of the world’s oldest factories, and they do factory tours! “We think of bells as living things, each with its own personality”, says Monika Unterholzner, whose family, the Grassmayrs have been making bells in Innsbruck since 1599, “and...
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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