Good morning The big news of the week was Wednesday’s announcement by American Airlines of their order for 460 new planes, which I quickly analyzed and sent out a commentary on immediately thereafter. If you get the realtime or daily updates, you’ve already seen this, otherwise it is available for you to read later in […]
What part of ‘there is no law against taking pictures of trains’ does the Maryland Transit Authority police not understand? This isn’t rocket science, and these people are specialist transport police. Look at this video showing two (then subsequently three then later on, four!) bullying transit police lying through their teeth and inventing laws that […]
Good morning Summer is making increasingly promising noises of its pending arrival on our doorstep any day now. In my case it has resulted in needing to buy a new mower to replace my old petrol powered mower that sadly failed to revive after its winter hibernation. I decided to save myself the ongoing maintenance […]
Good morning And happy Tax Day for another year. Other interesting anniversaries this week are the 50th anniversary of the first man in space and the 99th anniversary of the Titanic sinking. The more we learn about both events, the more it seems the outcomes should have been transposed. The Soviet launch of Yuri Gargarin […]
Maybe you've been to Britain and to Scotland before. But have you been to the islands off Scotland's west coast? Have you ventured up into the wilds of the highlands, way north of Inverness? Chances are you've done none of these things – yet. Here's a chance to change that, this June. Two […]
It has been a dismal week for air travel with weather related disruptions messing up much of the East coast; although the real focus on weather this week has to be on Australia and the appalling flooding that much of Queensland has been suffering. Here in Seattle however we had a delightful light fall of […]
Good morning Welcome to 2011 and the hope and promise of the year that lies ahead. So far, the year is off to a good start, with no terrorist acts over the Christmas/New Year period, although the TSA did start to get a bit anxious about Thermos type vacuum flasks just before Christmas. As you […]
Good morning And hello from Brussels, where I'm writing this on Thursday evening. Pictured is the 'Atomium' structure which has sort of become an iconic image for Brussels. It was built for the 1958 World Fair in Brussels, is 335ft tall, and its nine balls depict a unit cell of an iron crystal, albeit magnified […]
More good news for rail fans. The German rail operator, Deutsche Bahn, is moving forward with plans to run trains all the way to London (through the Channel Tunnel), and sent a test train to London's lovely St Pancras terminal this week. DB would initially operate trains from London to Frankfurt and Amsterdam (planned to […]
Two more items of rail news. First, some good news from Amtrak, reporting a record number of passengers for their fiscal year which ends on 30 September. Ridership was up almost 6% on the previous year, with 28.7 million passengers for the year in total. Income was up even more, to $1.74 billion, an increase […]
Lots more train news this week, most of it good, some of it surprising. Eurostar have announced a £700 million (about US$1.15 billion) program investing in new train sets that will go even faster than before, cutting the journey time between London and Paris down to about two hours (currently about 2 hrs 20 mins). […]
Here's an interesting article which implies you can sometimes succeed in negotiating down the foreign exchange fees charged by your bank/credit card issuer when you're buying things in a foreign currency. You might sneer at this concept, but a few years ago I inadvertently said something in a conversation with Bank of America's Visa department, and the result was […]