Early Color Film Footage from the 1930s Including Pan Am Flying Boats

A Trip Across America (mid 1930s)

Traveling

I will be traveling throughout this week. Absent something significant, there will be few or no blog posts during this time frame. Also comment moderation and responses to emails may be a bit slow. Bear with me.

"It was as if time stood still."

(CNN) — For years, several vintage Orient Express train carriages lay, forgotten, at a small railway station on the border between Poland and Belarus called Malaszwewicze.

One day in 2015, French railway fan Arthur Mettetal spotted the distinctive blue carriages in a YouTube video, kickstarting a journey across Europe to track down the lost trains.

Hospitality group Accor purchased the rediscovered carriages and enlisted Parisian architect Maxime d'Angeac to meticulously restore them, ready for operation on a Paris to Istanbul rail route that's set to operate from 2025.

The first glimpse of the renovated interiors suggest a glamorous travel experience combining Art Deco glamor with modern luxury.

Read the rest here with images. 

Grand Lux

Accommodations at the Wisdom Hotel in Wisdom Montana, April 1942. You know you're in a classy establishment when they make that effort to reduce lines and wait time.

San Francisco to New York in 1852

For those with an interest in life in the land of long ago; there is a remarkable journal of a trip from the city of San Francisco to New York fully twenty years before the completion of the trans-continental railroad. The voyage takes the gentleman on a primitive steamship down the coast of California to the Isthmus of Panama, thence overland to the Caribbean side and then up to New York with various stops and adventures along the way. The story begins about halfway down column four on page six of the New York Tribune here. To be honest, I found the entire paper to be a fascinating glimpse into a world now long gone, right down to the advertisements and the pouting about the results of the recent election. 

Travelogue: Europe to Dutch Colony in the 1920s

Absolutely stunning film footage shot in the mid to late1920s during a trip by sea from Holland to the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia). Lots of stops along the way. This is part 1 which gets us as far as Singapore. The footage has been stabilized, speed corrected and colorized. 

Paris in '39

Color home movies of Paris in 1939. I'm guessing this was in the spring based on the absense of summer type attire.

First Class Staterooms on the Titanic

Some video recreations of various first class staterooms on the Titanic based on surviving images as also of her near identical sister ship, Olympic, and builder's plans.

Traveling in Europe in the 1930s

A series of home movies shot while traveling in Europe. The nature and sequence of the footage suggests it was likely shot over more than one trip and visual evidence strongly points to the second half of the 1930s as the approximate time frame. (appx 1 hr with AI clean up and coloring added)

The Queen Mary

Worries are rising over COVID deniers and anti-vaxxers

Story here.

This could be a problem, but I think it's manageable. There are some people who subscribe to pseudoscientific beliefs and or conspiracy theories regarding vaccines and others who simply deny that Covid exists at all or if they concede its existence, they claim it is being overblown and that the reports of mass infections and deaths are false. Happily those subscribing to these delusional views are not huge in numbers. But there are enough that in some situations they could pose a serious health risk if you get a bunch of unvaccinated people in large groups.

On the one hand I dislike direct coercion in matters of conscience. So I would be opposed to laws mandating vaccination under pain of fine or jail. But on the other hand it is a well established principle of law that society does have the right to impose reasonable regulations to protect the public health. So my response would be to take steps to limit the ability of vaccine resisters to pose such a threat.

* Require all persons booking commercial airplane flights anywhere in the US, or overseas if bound for the US, to affirm under penalty of perjury that all those booking have been vaccinated. No vaccination... no plane trip.

* Ditto interstate bus and train tickets and all cruise ships/ocean liners.

* Require affirmation of vaccination as a condition for applying for or renewing a US passport.

* Hotels should be encouraged to require registering guests to affirm that they have been vaccinated.

* States should require students registering for schools and university to provide evidence of vaccination.

None of these measures are unreasonable as a public health response to a dangerous pandemic. People will still be able to refuse vaccination, but there will be consequences that for many will be inconvenient. They could still travel by private vehicle and children could be home schooled. Obviously, any such regulations should not be imposed until a vaccine has been available to the general public for a sufficient amount of time that anyone wanting one will have had the opportunity to get the jab.

In case anyone has an extra half million or so lying around...

Henry Flagler's private rail car is for sale.

Obama looking to avoid Waldorf hotel in New York after Chinese purchase

Every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has stayed in the presidential suite on the 35th floor of the Waldorf Astoria New York in Manhattan. The accommodations run $4,000-$6,000 per night, hotel officials say, and feature souvenirs collected from past commanders in chief and security measures like bulletproof glass windows. Current and former White House officials have long considered the hotel and its staff as the best in the world at hosting the most powerful man in the world.

That may all be about to change. President Barack Obama is on track to skip the Waldorf this fall when he heads to New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly, several officials told Yahoo News.

While the officials would not say so explicitly, they strongly indicated that the decision to reevaluate the historic relationship with the Waldorf was tied to the hotel’s sale to China’s Anbang Insurance Group, approved by U.S. regulators earlier this year. While Hilton will continue to operate the property for 100 years, one U.S. official linked the American decision to relocate the president to worries about Chinese espionage and to the announcement of an upcoming “major renovation” at the hotel that could provide an opportunity to install surveillance gear. The recent theft of millions of federal workers’ personal information, pinned on China, has fed the sense of alarm in Washington. China denies responsibility for the breach.

Read the rest here.

A sad, but probably necessary decision.

Hotel guests ‘fined’ for leaving bad review on TripAdvisor

A couple have been "fined" £100 by a Blackpool hotel they described as a "rotten stinking hovel" on travel review website TripAdvisor.

Tony and Jan Jenkinson posted the negative comments after being unimpressed with the one night they spent at the Broadway Hotel.

The couple, from Whitehaven, later found £100 charged to their credit card. The hotel said its policy was to charge for "bad" reviews.

Read the rest here.

Heading West

I am finally going home at the end of the month and I know how I want to travel....

Anyone got a spare time machine I can borrow?

Flight to Israel Delayed as Ultra-Orthodox Jews Demand Gender Segregation

An El-Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv was turned into an “11-hour nightmare” after hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jewish passengers refused to sit next to women.

Read the rest here.

Quote of the day...

"After fighting the sea and its terrors for thousands of years, man has at last succeeded in conquering the sea, this wildest and most unruly of nature's children. Against the modern iron or steel ship, which is equipped with every measure of protection that science and engineering can devise, the sea is almost powerless. Smaller vessels and sailing craft still feel its fury occasionally, it is true, but the enormous ships of the present day forge their way through the oceans at high speeds.

...The accounts of the dangers of ocean trips in former times, the primitive and unhealthy accommodations, and insufficient catering on board ships of earlier periods are very disquieting to intending travelers. This has now, however, all been done away with so that the modern steamers of today have so many safety devices, and the perfection of the instruments for the navigation of the ship, and the reliability of the charts, the number of light houses, have been brought to so perfect a standard that a voyage on a modern steamer entails less danger than a journey by train.

 -The Scientific American Handbook of Travel (1910 edition) pgs 2-3

The Border: Where Warrantless Searches and Seizures are Allowed

Newly released documents reveal how the government uses border crossings to seize and examine travelers’ electronic devices instead of obtaining a search warrant to gain access to the data.

The documents detail what until now has been a largely secretive process that enables the government to create a travel alert for a person, who may not be a suspect in an investigation, then detain that individual at a border crossing and confiscate or copy any electronic devices that person is carrying.

To critics, the documents show how the government can avert Americans’ constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure, but the confiscations have largely been allowed by courts as a tool to battle illegal activities like drug smuggling, child pornography and terrorism.

Read the rest here.

The Red Carpet Treatment

The New York Central Railroad's Twentieth Century Limited gave us the modern expression "the red carpet treatment' from their use of a red carpet on their trains. The Limited was an overnight all First Class express train that ran between New York and Chicago until the late 1960's. Each night at exactly the same time a train departed each city, one westbound and one eastbound. The Limited's exacting standards of luxury and service made it the preferred mode of transport for film and stage stars, millionaires, political big shots and just about anyone who wanted to see and be seen in high society. The above infomercial was produced in 1935.