Category Archives: Planes Trains and Automobiles

Traffic Poles

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 2025 CPKC Holiday Train will tour Canada and the U.S. Nov. 19 through Dec. 21, raising money, food and awareness to support food banks across our network. Professional musicians play free concerts from the brightly decorated train’s stage. CPKC donates to the local food bank at each stop and encourages all attendees to make a monetary or heart-healthy food donation.

Since its inaugural journey in 1999, the CPKC Holiday Train has raised more than $26 million and collected approximately 5.4 million pounds of food for community food banks in Canada and the U.S.

Link

2025 Canadian Schedule
2025 American Schedule

Halloween Lawn Mower

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.

Anniversary of the Camaro

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

Battle Wagon

You sank my battleship!

Back to the Future trailer

SR-71 ‘Blackbird’ Sets ‘Speed Over a Recognized Course’ record

SR-71

The SR-71 holds the “Speed Over a Recognized Course” record for flying from New York to London distance 3,508 miles (5,646 km), 1,435.587 miles per hour (2,310.353 km/h), and an elapsed time of 1 hour 54 minutes and 56.4 seconds, set on September 1, 1974 while flown by U.S. Air Force Pilot Maj. James V. Sullivan and Maj. Noel F. Widdifield, reconnaissance systems officer (RSO). This equates to an average velocity of about Mach 2.68, including deceleration for in-flight refueling. Peak speeds during this flight were probably closer to the declassified top speed of Mach 3.2+. For comparison, the best commercial Concorde flight time was 2 hours 52 minutes, and the Boeing 747 averages 6 hours 15 minutes.

Wikipedia Link

For when you need the pizza yesterday!

Mystery AT-AT

Imperial Volks-Walker

Full Flight (B-1, B-2, B-52, F-15, F-16, A-10)

B-1, B-2, B-52, F-15, F-16, A-10

Aircraft carriers of the world

A little late… but too funny NOT to show… 🙂 (iykyk)

Boing 747

56th Annual Street Rod Nationals

56th Annual Street Rod Nationals


Kentucky Exposition Center, Louisville, Kentucky
July 31st, August 1st – 3rd, 2025

Website

56th Annual Street Rod Nationals

56th Annual Street Rod Nationals


Kentucky Exposition Center, Louisville, Kentucky
July 31st, August 1st – 3rd, 2025

Website

Brittany Force makes fastest run in NHRA history

Anniversary of STS-135 landing

Space shuttle Atlantis lands for the STS-135 mission marking the final mission of the Space Shuttle Program at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Time of landing was 5:57 a.m. (EDT) on July 21, 2011.

The “just at dawn” landing was one of the most memorable landings ever, as shown in this picture:

STS-135 Landing

 

56th Annual Street Rod Nationals

56th Annual Street Rod Nationals


Kentucky Exposition Center, Louisville, Kentucky
July 31st, August 1st – 3rd, 2025

Website