This summer, The Steam Dreams Rail Co. is launching The Royal Windsor Steam Express, the first regular steam train service in recent history from London Waterloo to Windsor. The service will leave Waterloo at 08.02, 11.10 and 14.10 every Tuesday, June 4th – September 3rd. There will...
London North Eastern Railway (LNER) has installed a system called Seat Sensor on all its trains. The new technology, which has just gone ‘live’, can tell which seats are free and, by referencing LNER’s booking data, whether a seat is reserved. Passengers can now see the status...
Hardly a month seems to go by without another story of how the preservation of a battlefield site, usually in the USA or UK, is threatened by developers. In Scotland over recent months we’ve seen moves to build houses on part of Culloden¹, to accommodate a road...
Well, actually more than a doll’s house – a museum display of scenes of an Edwardian country estate in 1/12th scale. It’s a bit twee for me to be honest, but I’m a sucker for models and miniature dioramas, and some of these scenes are astonishingly detailed...
The Vulcan to the Sky Trust is inviting the public to add their names to Avro Vulcan XH558 – the longest serving Royal Air Force Vulcan bomber, and the last to fly. It’s a time-limited opportunity for anyone to place their chosen name on a set of...
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....
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...
Work is starting this year on a £5m museum to tell the story of the Royal Navy in Plymouth. It’s part of a 12-year plan by the National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) to highlight the role and heritage of its branches in their key locations....
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....
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...
If there’s one thing a visit to the Culloden battlefield reveals, it’s what a poor choice of ground Charles Edward Stuart (aka ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’) selected for the last major battle fought on British soil. It is flat and open moorland, that’s a start. But, given that...
This weekend, Virgin Trains set up a photo-opportunity event for rail enthusiasts – four generations of trains travelling side by side on the East Coast Line. Of course, it was also a marketing opportunity to show off Virgin Trains’ new Azuma, alongside two present-day trains, and the...
The National Army Museum will be opening its doors to the public on Thursday (30 March) after a £23.75m redevelopment that sees the building transformed from what the Director General, Janice Murray, described to me as a gloomy warren “rather like a car park”, to a bright...
The National Railway Museum in York is just one of those key landmark museums in the UK, like the Science Museum in London, or IWM Duxford, that you have to see… and you don’t have to sacrifice any ‘me time’ away from your family or partner to...
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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