The one I was on is now called the Vostok, which is the Russian-run Moscow to Beijing route. I did it in 2006, but apparently there’s also a Chinese train on the route now and that’s supposed to be a better, more comfortable train.

This. I’ve done the Trans-Siberian railway. Smooth it is not. 

There is no “good trade deal with the US” to be done. Especially with Agent Orange in the White House. This is the fundamental problem with the Brexiter’s position on trade; they think Britain can do better deals as a bloc of 65m people than as a bloc of 500m, when in reality they don’t even have anyone to do trade…

Short-term thinking. The Chicken tax pushed American manufacturers into a protected sector, while their investment and competitiveness in other sectors withered because it was just too damn easy to make more trucks. So now the best-selling cars in America are made by the Japanese and Koreans, and more importantly, the…

When I was a kid I was always quite taken with Warsteiner cars, especially the Arrows cars, which were always pretty poor performers but looked amazing:

There are a lot of missionaries out there that use the version of “Hi, I’m here to help you get running water, electricity, and educate your children. May I?” Those are surprisingly welcome in large parts of Africa and Central and South America.

This was the real problem with Dredd; the story was fine, Karl Urban was great, but the lack of budget when it came to set design and props was painfully obvious. It just wasn’t BigMeg enough. 

The antipodes of New Zealand seems to be Spain, not France, and weirdly Wellington in New Zealand (named after the Duke) is almost exactly on the opposite side of the world to Salamanca, where he fought one of his most famous battles. I wonder if they knew? 

This has always been the problem with Fiat group dealerships in general. In Europe you usually end up with a weird Alfa/Fiat/Jeep/sometimes-Maserati setup under the same roof (although in the UK the Masers are usually still at the Ferrari showrooms, that isn’t the case in other European markets). 

Part of the problem is the Levante and Ghibli were built around the assumption of a “diesel-first” strategy in Europe at exactly the moment when diesel became toxic (pardon the pun) so loads of their capital spend had been directed towards new diesel engines (the first gen engines were always a stopgap) which are now…

How do parking permits work in Chicago? In London this wouldn’t work because the permits for additional vehicles per house skyrocket in price (some would say unreasonably so). 

I’ve managed to avoid CDG for over a decade at this point; still gives me nightmares (although to be honest I can’t think of any French airports I’d call good). Having said that Schipol is looking a bit tatty these days and the Shengen-to-non-Shengen passport process is a bit of a pain if you have a connecting flight.

Finally saw an 8-series in the metal yesterday (on a plinth in Frankfurt airport); it’s proportions are so obviously off because the “real” 8-series (the one that actually sells in numbers to the Europeans and the Chinese) will be the GC version, which will fix some of the wonky styling (I’d bet real money they…

I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I’m guessing several hundred million Catholics would beg to differ. 

Nope. My inner 10-year old would not be putting this on the bedroom wall/unlocking it on Gran Turismo. It just leaves me cold. I’m sure it’s technically very interesting, but I find myself giving no fucks about aero for aero’s sake. 

I used to work for a National Lottery. Can confirm a non-zero number of people win the lottery jackpot. Now I no longer work for the lottery, and I know intimately how the lottery works, yes I play the lottery.

Since they made 110,000 RR Merlins and 55K Packards, I’m going to call shenanigans on that story, unless those hand-crafting artisans were on meth for six years.

The Germans were ahead in rockets, but not in jets. While the first German jets flew a few months before the British version, the engine itself was junk; it need a complete rebuild after every flight and was a design dead-end; whereas the straight evolutionary line from the Rolls-Royce Trent, then Derwent, then Nene,…

Have one driver per team and you’re going to have a pretty empty grid. F1 struggles to keep a full grid as it is.

So basically the way we’ve been buying cars in Europe since forever?