by Sevaan Franks on December 14, 2009
The famed Orient Express is no more. It was an unrealized dream of mine to ride it, and now I suppose I shall never get to.
The Orient Express — the very name carries an aura of glamour and mystery. Van Helsing rode it to his battle with Dracula. James Bond romanced a beautiful Russian aboard it. And Agatha Christie set one of the best-known murders in literary history aboard that train.
Now the original Orient Express is itself about to become part of history. On Monday, the route will disappear from European railway timetables, a victim of high-speed trains and cut-rate airlines.
The height of the Orient Express’ fabled luxury was probably in the 1930s, PBS travel guide Rick Steves tells NPR’s Scott Simon. That was back when the train was four sleeper cars and a single luggage car. “But in practice, the Orient Express is the practical way you get across the Balkans,” Steves says.
“Back in the Cold War, you were dealing with Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and barking dogs. And I remember everybody with a briefcase looked mysterious to me, anybody with an overcoat — what’s under that overcoat? And of course, it was that mystique of going east.”
Steves points out that there are actually two Orient Expresses. The one that people probably think of now is a tour company that renovates 1930s-era cars and takes people from London to Venice. It’s the other Orient Express that’s taking its final trip.
“The historic Orient Express — that’s the one that was established back in the 1880s — that took you from Paris or London to Istanbul,” he says.
[Full story]
by Sevaan Franks on November 24, 2009
A Russian billionaire has bought Hitler’s Mercedes for $8.3 million.
The midnight blue 770 K model car was locked away in a collector’s garage in Bielefeld along with seven other vehicles used by Nazi leaders.
Michael Froehlich, a Duesseldorf car dealer, said he brokered the deal for the unnamed billionaire, who also bought the other vehicles in the collection.
Included among the collection was an identical Mercedes once owned by Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister who was hanged at Nuremberg for war crimes.
After the Second World War the car travelled the world, first going to Austria, then to a car museum in Las Vegas, then back across the ocean to a brewery tycoon in Munich and finally to the anonymous collector in the British army garrison town of Bielefeld.
[Full story]
by Sevaan Franks on July 14, 2009
Ridelust has an interesting post on the history of the car headlamp.
Today we’re going to take a look at a piece of automotive equipment that most people don’t give much thought to unless you’re blinded by them or forget to turn them on and get a freakin’ ticket. Headlights have been around for longer than automobiles (carriages used lights that were basically lanterns), but the vast increase in speed afforded by the auto meant that old technologies just wouldn’t cut it in the new order of things. Join us to explore how the headlight evolved into the high-tech device we know today.
by Sevaan Franks on June 25, 2009
I live in Toronto, Canada and am very excited to see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. Here is an interesting article from the Toronto Star about how the scrolls are transported.
Only first-class seats are big enough to accommodate the scrolls’ steel travel cases, Siggers says, and there’s much less traffic in the high-priced seats, so less chance of passengers jostling them. And only direct flights are allowed to lessen the chances of a mishap.
The cargo hold is out of the question. The scrolls’ required environmental conditions are very strict, and they can never be out of eyesight of the three or more officials from the Israel Antiquities Authority who travel with them.
Like royalty, often required to travel separately to ensure the line of succession is not wiped out in one tragic event, the scrolls travel in small groups on separate flights.
by Sevaan Franks on June 16, 2009
A bronze arrowhead, two clay figures and two chariots have been found on the first day of the new Terracotta Warriors excavation.
“The most important discoveries are two four-horse chariots that are standing in tandem very closely together,” Xinhua quoted Cao Wei as saying. Cao is the deputy curator of the Qin Shihuang Terracotta Warriors and Horses Museum.
Other significant discoveries are two, painted but faded clay figures. The finds appear to answer the widely held belief that another sizable number of warriors exist beneath the tomb of Qin Shihuang, first emperor in Chinese history, and for whom the entire site was created some 2,000 years ago.
by Sevaan Franks on May 31, 2009
The Auto Union D-type racer is one of the rarest vintage cars in the world, and one of Hitler’s favourites. Now you can own it…for nearly $9 million.
When the Red Army overran Berlin at the end of the war, all Silver Arrows cars were immediately shipped back to the NAMI motor research institute in Moscow to be reverse-engineered: a brutal process that destroyed almost all of them, one being chopped in half to serve as a trailer for an apparatchik’s car.
Nobody knew this chassis – number 19 – had survived, until American car enthusiast Paul Karassik tracked it down, adding an original engine from a separate D-type carcass and handing it over to British Silver Arrow specialists Crosthwaite and Gardiner to restore to its original form.
