Engine Punk

At the National Railway Museum in York, to emphasize the importance of streamlining in pre-war industrial design, some inspired person had arranged for a Chrysler Airflow saloon to be parked next to the Duchess of Hamilton . The Duchess of Hamilton has been rebuilt with the eye catching fairings it had when new. Many streamlined engines lost them during WW2 when speeds were slow and access problems hampered maintenance. Mallard is probably the most iconic of Britain's wind-cheating locomotives but the LMS engines were their great rivals. And they had go-faster stripes. So what would the streamlining enthusiast have chosen for his motor car? From stepping off the Coronation Scot hauled by the Duchess of Hamilton to his Schneider Trophy winning Supermarine seaplane, our man would have travelled in a Chrysler Heston Airflow. The Chrysler Heston Airflow - Chrysler Charlton Heston Airflow sounds impossibly heroic - was the UK version, modified for use in Blighty by the importe...

The Bullet Train still looks fantastic almost fifty years after its introduction Another observation from my trip to York was about high speed rail travel. At the National Railway Museum was a Japanese Bullet train. Much as I like steam engines, I remember the first time I heard of the Bullet Train. It looked like a piece of space technology on rails and travelled at over 130mph. I liked it despite my loyalty to steam. This was a truly futuristic form of travel, a revolution based on first principles rather than one that had simply grown out of tradition.  So could we have a Bullet Train in Britain? At the museum, actors were putting on a small story telling play about the Bullet Train or Shinkansen - literally the new main line.  They put across the point that the Bullet Train rejected the standard gauge of 3'6" with which a British engineer had saddled the country from the outset. It adopted standard gauge but the train in the museum was conspiciously wider th...

Wrightbus have successfully won market share in the fiercely competitive bus market. I'd never heard of them until recently. Obviously I'm a lapsed industrial designer. Or they build buses too quietly. Some people refer to modes of public transport, particularly omnibuses, as loser cruisers. I think this originates from Margaret Thatcher who described "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure." From a snobbish Tory point of view, public transport is not aspirational. Despite my engine punk proclivities, I am an enthusiastic and regular user of public transport. Having adopted the train and walking as the means of my commute (apart from the short drive to the station) I have become a leisure driver. Apart from shopping trips, these days I drive purely for pleasure. From my latest environmental audit, I am greener than most. This always surprises me because engine punks like me are suppoosed to be public enemy number o...