The 100-year-old American steam logging locomotive, Mount Emily Shay No.1, travelled by flatcar to its new home, the Oregon Rail Heritage Center, on Thursday (15 Feb). The historic locomotive had been in the care of the Oregon Historical Society (OHS) for more than six decades when, in...
A new exhibition featuring 23 exotic clockwork treasures beloved by Chinese emperors, and loaned from The Palace Museum in Beijing, opened this week at the Science Museum in London. The magnificent 18th century automata, called Zimingzhong 凝时聚珍: meaning ‘self-sounding bells’ or ‘bells that ring themselves’, combine timekeeping,...
The Bawdsey Radar Museum is a small museum set up in the former transmission bunker on the 168-acre Bawdsey Manor estate, which became the home of British radar development in the 1930s, and later became RAF Bawdsey, a radar training school and Cold War missile base. The...
Blenheim Palace, home to the Dukes of Marlborough since 1705, has started its annual deep clean, which, it turns out, is quite a complex process requiring more than a can of Pledge (other multi-surface cleaners are available) and a feather duster! The deep clean includes everything from...
The National Motor Museum at Beaulieu says that fundraising for its Sunbeam 1000hp restoration, began last March and has now reached £50,000, putting it well on the path to raising the £300k needed to take the car to Daytona in the USA for the centenary of its...
The Air & Space Museum (Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace), sprawled around the magnificent art deco terminal building at Paris’ former passenger airport, Le Bourget, is France’s premier aviation museum. It’s huge, and well worth the journey to the outskirts of Paris to visit. Only, make...
Chris and Julie Ramsey, husband and wife adventurers, have completed their all-electric journey to the South Pole in Antarctica. Their 10-month, 30,000 km adventure that started on the frozen Arctic Sea at the 1823 Magnetic North Pole, has seen them drive the varied terrains and conditions of...
Over 50% of London’s 14,700 black taxis are now actively contributing to cleaning up London’s air, says the London Electric Vehicle Company (LEVC) who have, under different names*, been building London’s black cabs since 1908. Their electric TX model has been on sale since January 2018 and...
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) has launched For Evermore: Stories of the Fallen, a new portal that will enable people to add stories, content and images of those who served and died in the First and Second World Wars. The new story sharing platform, developed by...
The newly opened D-Day Collins Museum recreates General Joseph Lawton Collins’ VII Corps headquarters at Chateau de Franquetot, in the actual building itself where he met more than once with Generals Omar Bradley, George Patton and Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower. And to give the...
This impressive howitzer was designed for the US Army in the inter-war years to fill a requirement for a modern long-range field-artillery piece. Its development was a little sluggish. The first model was produced in 1920, but it wasn’t until 1940 that the bugs were ironed out...
Most people know that the famous airborne glider attack on Pegasus Bridge just after midnight on 6th June 1944 marked the start of D-Day, but I suspect many are a little confused about where exactly this dramatic action took place. At the east end of the landing...
The British Normandy Memorial lists the names of 22,442 servicemen & women serving under British command, who died in Normandy. It was conceived during the 71st D-Day Anniversary reunion in 2015, in a chance conversation between a British veteran, George Batts, and the BBC broadcaster Nicholas Witchell....
The Laatzen-Hanover Aviation Museum (Laatzen-Hannover Luftfahrt Museum), to give it its full name, is not a huge museum but it’s a really interesting aviation museum and it packs a lot – some 4,000+ artefacts – into its 3,500 m² of display space. The museum was founded by...
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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