After six years of planning and construction a new state-of-the-art cable car made its inaugural journey today on the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain. The new cable car replaces the old Eibsee cable car* that has been taking up to half a million passengers a year up the...
Perfect for petrol-heads! Saxony in Germany is highlighting new developments at two of its automobile visitor attractions for 2018. They suggest 2018 is the right time to explore Saxony as a place where automobile history was written, by heading first to the small town of Zwickau, which...
A bedding manufacturer is planning a commuter bus fitted with sleeping pods. Remember Harry Potter’s Night Bus? Well this could be a little less…wild! The idea is to give bleary-eyed Brits some shut-eye on their ride home at the end of a long day. The “snoozliner” is...
It’s hard to get a grasp on just how significant the Lumière brothers were to cinematography, how tirelessly creative, and what astonishingly brilliant engineers they were. A visit to their spectacular family home in Lyons certainly helps. Auguste and Louis Lumière were the firstborn sons of Charles-Antoine...
Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism has officially declared 2018 to be the Year of Troia (Troy). The archaeological remains of Troy are to be found on the outskirts of the town of Hisarlik in the Anatolian province of Çanakkale close to the Dardanelles. The site, excavated...
Triumph Motorcycles has just opened (yesterday) its new £4 million Triumph visitor experience and factory tour. The new facility at the Triumph Motorcycles HQ and factory site in Hinckley, Leicestershire will enable fans to get up close to the most iconic and rare Triumph motorbikes in the...
As many know, Croydon Aerodrome in the 1920s & 30s was a cutting edge airport featuring the world’s first control tower, developing the concept of Air Traffic Control, and inventing the radio call “Mayday”. It was also the major aviation hub for London, and the gateway through...
Imperial War Museum (IWM) – Duxford is primarily an aircraft museum, but the westernmost building is not, like the others, a giant hanger full of aircraft. Instead it is where the lion’s share of the IWM’s military vehicle collection is displayed – in the Land Warfare building....
Engineers can be SO cool! This is a fascinating video of a company called ALE*, who specialised in moving/lifting/sliding heavy stuff, swapping out a 7.5 ton crankshaft from an engine on the cruise liner MS Zaandam. This is small-scale, bread & butter stuff (they did two cruise...
I came across an interesting anecdote in a book, In the Cockpit – Flying the World’s Great Aircraft*, which gives a pilot’s view and experience of flying a range of over 50 amazing military aircraft from biplanes to jets. The chapter on the 1st World War Handley...
Make sure your shoelaces are done up tightly! It worried me that mine could have been tighter!
Not so much a brand museum as an art installation
Stow Maries Great War Aerodrome, near Maldon in Essex, has won £4.3m of National Lottery funding that will enable it to be transformed into a major visitor attraction. The near-complete example of a First World War aerodrome, untouched and largely forgotten for 60 years, was built in...
Despite Menorca’s key military position in the 17th-19th centuries, I hadn’t really expected too much from the Museu Militar de Menorca in Es Castell, but it’s actually rather good. Like many islands in the Mediterranean, Menorca was a fortress and its military history reflects that, not only...
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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