Trains & Boats & Planes – 2024
Thursday, 30 January 2025All three forms of transport featured in my 2024 travels and I posted a blog on my my favourite tube stations around the London underground train system.
▲ Trains no longer stop in Marceline, Missouri although lots of visitors come there for the Walt Disney Museum and this Santa Fe locomotive is a reminder that it was the Santa Fe Railway which gave the town its name, the wife of a railway company director was named Marcelina.
▲ My trip Kansas City to St Louis and then back again – different route – to Kansas City was a classic American road trip, but we visited the historic railway stations at both ends, stayed in the Union Station Hotel in St Louis and checked out the Amtrak Missouri River Runner as it was about to depart Kansas City.
▲ Travelling to London’s Marylebone Station I departed from charming Leamington Spa after my visit to Coventry.
◄ Arriving or departing London at Paddington Station check the statue of that pioneering Victorian era engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel between Platforms 8 and 9. In my Thames Statues blog I mention the Brunel Museum and Brunel Engine House in Rotherhithe and my Thames Path walking also took me under the river using the Thames Tunnel, built by Isambard and his father Marc Brunel between 1825 and 1843. Not far from the tunnel, on the north side of the river in Millwall, you can still see the timber footings from the construction of Brunel’s gigantic Great Eastern, which was completed there in 1858. It was so large that it had to be constructed sideways along the river and launched that way.
▲ I always like airport train services, like the one in Zurich which took me from Hottingerplatz, close to the Zurich Opernhaus, to the Zurich Flughafen.
▲ Boat travels, well I took the boat across from Port Arthur in Tasmania to wade ashore at Denmans Cove at the start of the three day Three Capes Track walk
▲ Billionaires and their super yachts? I saw this one docked at the marina in Antibes in the south of France, a stone’s throw west of Nice. Bikini in the Marshall Islands has become a popular boat registration location in part simply because ‘Bikini’ looks cool on your transom.
▲ I didn’t fly on this one, but I did like this Ethiopian Airlines DC3 in the roundabout just by Addis Ababa Airport. I was flying to Abuja in Nigeria on a much more modern Ethiopian Airlines A350
▲ We drove from Kansas City to St Louis, both in the state of Missouri, and then back again by a different route. Then we flew from Kansas City to Atlanta, Georgia, passing over St Louis looking very nice at night.
▲ From Atlanta I continued to Charleston, South Carolina while my road trip companions Simon and Charlotte flew back to London. Except they didn’t, before they crossed the USA-Canada border their flight had some sort of ‘technical difficulties’ (usually that means the coffee machine isn’t working?), made a U-turn and headed back to Atlanta. So where were they when the problems forced the turnaround? Close to Punxsutawney in northern Pennsylvania which movie fans will recognise as the town in Groundhog Day where things just happen over again and over again. Fortunately the next day their flight flew over Punxsutawney and kept going to London.
▲ Meanwhile I continued from Charleston to New York City and then continued to London, as we climbed away from JFK Airport I could look back at the airport, Far Rockaway (always loved that suburb name), and Long Beach.
▲ Our Belfast wedding trip took us in to Belfast International Airport – rather than the usually more convenient George Best Belfast City Airport – but the baggage carousel featured an ad for those ever popular Derry Girls.
▲ Air India flew me from New Delhi to Melbourne and in the final seconds before landing any good airline nerd could tell that shadow is from a 787 Dreamliner.
