Sunday, November 1, 2026

mid-1920s Buicks in Gore NZ

Left: a Buick Touring/Phæton model (a multi-passenger family car). Right: a Buick Roadster model (a sporty, two-door open-top car).

Present day view

a New Zealand NAC Boeing 737-200 at night circa 1968

Probably at Christchurch airport just after these were introduced.  For lots more, get the book The Aircraft of Air New Zealand and affiliates since 1940,

'big good real books give me so much pleasure'

Sydney prison tram from 1909, Australia



This was a heavily secured electric tramcar which holds the status as arguably the world's only purpose-built prison tram from the ground up. 
Built at the Randwick Tramway Workshops in 1909, it was explicitly used by the New South Wales Police Department to transfer inmates between the Long Bay Penal Institution (Gaol) and the Darlinghurst Court House. It ran four times a day for forty years.

To keep inmates away from the public gaze, the 15-tonne tram featured a steel floor, thick drab walls, a side corridor, and six heavily secured, windowless cell compartments (four for men, two for women) capable of holding 48 prisoners total. It proudly displayed a "No Passengers" sign on the front and rear windows because prisoners were not legally classified as paying passengers. 

Despite its imposing, escape-proof reputation, it became notorious on March 4, 1946. While the tram was traveling through Kensington, a famous Sydney criminal named Darcy Dugan (along with an accomplice) used a serrated bread knife stolen from the prison kitchen to cut a hole straight through the tram's thin, canvas-covered wooden roof, climbing out while the tram was in motion. 

The tram was withdrawn from service in early 1950 when the police department transitioned to road transport. Today, the fully restored, real-world Prison Tram 948 is on permanent display at the Sydney Tramway Museum in Loftus, South Sydney, where visitors can still see the patch on the roof from Dugan's legendary escape. 

A scale model by Redfern Tramworks is about to be released (second pic above)

cars in Bermidji, Minnesota, early 1950s


The dark-colored car parked on the far left in front of the Rex Café looks like a 1951 or 1952 Kaiser Deluxe (or Manhattan) sedan. It is identifiable by its distinctive "widow's peak" dip at the top center of the windshield, unique grille profile, and rounded body lines characteristic of Kaiser-Frazer styling from that specific era. 

1948 Ford DeLuxe convertible

 

Saturday, October 31, 2026

Toshiba-built Buenos Aires suburban train at Arata, Argentina


These EMUs are powered from a 600V DC third-rail system. Seen on the Urquiza Line in Parque Chas (near La Paternal and Agronomía).

Great Eastern Railway Class T26 (LNER Class E4) 2-4-0, England


British Railways/LNER/GER 2-4-0 steam locomotive #62785 at Mildenhall railway station in Suffolk. 100 of these were built between 1891 and 1902. The scene is not as old as it looks, a pic from a Cambridge University Railway Club special railtour on 28 November 1959. 

Meeting d'Aviation in Nice, France poster, 1910

What today we would call an airshow.

2-8-0 'Consolidation' type steam locomotive at the highest point on Peru's railway, circa 1910


Built by the Rogers Locomotive Works. The railway pass today is operated by the private concessionaire Ferrocarril Central Andino (FCCA). While the open-air tracks right at Ticlio station are mostly bypassed by modern traffic via the nearby Galera Summit Tunnel (which pierces the mountain ridge at an altitude of 15,692 feet / 4,783 meters), the trans-Andean mainline itself remains fully operational.