Designs for four new terrifying but beautiful structures for the Zhiangjiajie National Forest Park in China’s Human province, have been unveiled by their French designers, Martin Duplantier Architectes. The Chinese are fast developing a love-hate relationship with vertigo experiences in their cities and their landscapes, and the spectacular...
The massive 57-kilometre Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT) in the Swiss Alps is finally opening this weekend after 17 years of construction. From Sunday 11 December, train passengers will be able to speed between northern & southern Switzerland in 17 minutes, cutting the overall cross-border journey time from...
I’ve got a special place in my heart for the Yorkshire Air Museum. I visited a lot of aircraft museums this summer (well… four!) and they’ve all got amazing exhibits and displays to talk about, but the Yorkshire Air Museum made me the happiest. There’s something special...
The City of London Corporation’s planning and transport committee has just given the go-ahead for 1 Undershaft, a 73-storey/290-metre skyscraper in the City of London. It will be the second tallest building in Western Europe, after The Shard on the other side of the Thames. The Museum...
The WW2 ‘Battle of Britain’ is etched deep in the collective memory of Brits, whether alive at the time or not. As everyone knows, it was an intense struggle between the RAF “few” and the massed aerial fleets of Germany’s Luftwaffe. What most people, including me, don’t...
One of the key travel trends identified in this year’s World Travel Market – Global Trends Report, compiled by Euromonitor International is the return of supersonic air travel. Thirteen years after the demise of Concorde, a number of initiatives are underway to re-open the supersonic air travel...
Nobody visits Stockholm, for business or pleasure, without visiting the Vasa Museum, and that’s as it should be – the Vasa is, without doubt, one of the great treasures of the world. The story The Vasa was King Gustavos Adolphus’ brand new flagship for the Swedish Navy...
The National Army Museum has saved T E Lawrence’s dagger, robes and kaffiyah for the nation thanks to two grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) totalling £113,400. Lawrence was given the dagger, known as a jambiya, by Sherif Nasir in 1917 after the victory of...
The Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington, has been working with Microsoft to digitise the interiors of some of its aircraft. It means that visitors to the museum, and to the museum’s website, can wander through the cockpit and interiors on the Surface Pro tablets carried by...
The Air Museum at Duxford, one of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) sites, is probably the most important, ‘must-see’ aircraft museum in the UK. If you haven’t been, you really should, it is excellent. There are a number of things that set it apart. Firstly, its history....
This is pretty impressive. It’s the world’s largest ship elevator built onto the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River at Yichang City, Hubei Province, central China. It opened earlier this month (18 Sep) and it enables small passenger & cargo ships up to 3,000 DWT(deadweight ton)...
Deutsche Bahn’s new long-distance train, was presented to the public yesterday at Berlin Central Station. The new ICE 4 train, which according to Dr. Rüdiger Grube, Chairman of the Management Board and CEO of Deutsche Bahn, “ushers in a new era” comes with numerous technical innovations and...
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...
Two electric driverless buses started working on the streets of Lyon this week at the beginning of a year long trial. The keyword is “working”, though… not “earning”! The buses, manufactured by a Lyon-based company, Navya, have been road tested in other French cities but until now,...
This is a niche blog about technically-minded travel. It reflects my own interests in the mechanical, technical, historical, engineering, transport and military world.
COPYRIGHT © MECHTRAVELLER 2016-2025, including all images unless indicated otherwise.
