Category Archives: Planes Trains and Automobiles

Model Train Plays Music for Guinness World Record

Fordson Snow-Motor

Canadian Pacific Holiday Train

From Wikipedia:

Starting in 1999, CP runs a Holiday Train along its main line during the months of November and December. The Holiday Train celebrates the holiday season and collects donations for community food banks and hunger issues. The Holiday Train also provides publicity for CP and a few of its customers. Each train has a box car stage for entertainers who are travelling along with the train.

The train is a freight train, but also pulls vintage passenger cars which are used as lodging/transportation for the crew and entertainers. Only entertainers and CP employees are allowed to board the train aside from a coach car that takes employees and their families from one stop to the next. All donations collected in a community remain in that community for distribution.

There are two Holiday Trains that cover 150 stops in Canada and the United States Northeast and Midwest. Each train is roughly 1,000 feet (300 m) in length with brightly decorated railway cars, including a modified box car that has been turned into a travelling stage for performers. They are each decorated with hundred of thousands of LED Christmas lights. In 2013 to celebrate the program’s 15th year, three signature events were held in Hamilton, Ontario, Calgary, Alberta, and Cottage Grove, Minnesota, to further raise awareness for hunger issues.

The trains feature different entertainers each year; in 2016, one train featured Dallas Smith and the Odds, while the other featured Colin James and Kelly Prescott. After its 20th anniversary tour in 2018, which hosted Terri Clark, Sam Roberts Band, The Trews and Willy Porter, the tour reported to have raised more than CA$15.8 million and collected more than 4.5 million pounds (2,000 t) of food since 1999.

Canadian Pacific Holiday Train

And thus began one of humanity’s greatest road trips.

On December 11, 1972, astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt had just stepped out of the lunar lander. And thus began one of humanity’s greatest road trips.

Sure, the definition of a “road trip” is a bit vague, but when you’re thousands of miles from Earth and the nearest professional mechanic, the series of trips the crew of Apollo 17 made in the Lunar Rover has to qualify as one. Especially when you consider that they drove more than 22 miles in the thing, a trip which took four hours and 26 minutes.

Read the rest here at Jalopnik

Packard Self-Parking Car – 1933

Singer

Ford introduces the Eluminator!

Read the write up at Jalopnik!

Adorable DIY Bumblebee Transformer Costume!

Evolution of Formula 1 Lap Times

14 Wheeled Lada (box)

Anniversary of Yeager Breaking the Sound Barrier

yeager_glamorous_glennis

U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound.

Yeager, born in Myra, West Virginia, in 1923, was a combat fighter during World War II and flew 64 missions over Europe. He shot down 13 German planes and was himself shot down over France, but he escaped capture with the assistance of the French Underground. After the war, he was among several volunteers chosen to test-fly the experimental X-1 rocket plane, built by the Bell Aircraft Company to explore the possibility of supersonic flight.

For years, many aviators believed that man was not meant to fly faster than the speed of sound, theorizing that transonic drag rise would tear any aircraft apart. All that changed on October 14, 1947, when Yeager flew the X-1 over Rogers Dry Lake in Southern California. The X-1 was lifted to an altitude of 25,000 feet by a B-29 aircraft and then released through the bomb bay, rocketing to 40,000 feet and exceeding 662 miles per hour (the sound barrier at that altitude). The rocket plane, nicknamed “Glamorous Glennis,” was designed with thin, unswept wings and a streamlined fuselage modeled after a .50-caliber bullet.

Because of the secrecy of the project, Bell and Yeager’s achievement was not announced until June 1948. Yeager continued to serve as a test pilot, and in 1953 he flew 1,650 miles per hour in an X-1A rocket plane. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1975 with the rank of brigadier general.

Hippopotamus

Wooden Ferrari Makes Waves in Venice

WTF?

Anniversary of the Camaro

On this day (September 29) in 1966, the Camaro went on sale for the 1967 model year.

Giant Violin Floats Down Venice Canal

Car Split in Half!

Smart Accident

My Plane Has A Gun