Today I turned my Culture Blog into Transport Blog by mistake. Concorde got me thinking (again) about how pretty airplanes can be, on the day Concorde did its last commercial flights, and again today because of a photo David Farrer took of Concorde in Edinburgh. That got me looking at pictures of trains, and of course it was a downward gradient from there. Here's the latest comment on my train posting this morning, from Michael Jennings, about trains on something called, it seems, the "Bealville curves":

I've seen similar things snaking through the American west myself. The American rail system has essentially done away with passengers and has been optimised for freight, and many of the trains are really long and really tall. (They often double stack standard shipping containers). They are really stunningly efficient and well run.

Now I realise that "culture means what Brian Micklethwait says it means" but this is overdoing it. Culture is culture, and rail systems being "optimised for freight" is, I feel, straying from the subject a little.

It's my fault. I started it, in the previous post about Concorde. Is it allowed for me to quote me? I guess it is if I say it is:

Antoine Clarke gave an excellent talk at my place last Friday evening about Concorde, and about the contrasting attitudes of Britain and France to its demise. Basically, British Airways made a success of running it, if you exclude the small matter of how much it cost to build the damn thing! So we mourned and celebrated. Air France couldn't even do that, and were glad to see it go. And France didn't mourn or celebrate, other than giving a media nod to all the mourning and celebrating going on in Britain.

Which is odd, because usually the French State is quite good at these money-no-object flag-waving ikon things, while here in Britain we tend to screw them up.

Although, British Airways also owns London's Wheel (of the "London Eye" as they insist on calling it) and that looks great and works well too.

It's obvious really. Give The Dome to British Airways too. They obviously have the magic touch with these things. After all, for many decades they themselves were one of "these things". Turning national monuments into profitable national monuments is what they do, because when they were privatised they started by doing this to themselves.

That is very transportational too, I would say.