Category: History

A Viaduct for Staithes

A little more from my trawl through “The North Eastern Railway – Its Rise and Development“ – this time it’s a nice (and, as far as I can tell, unique) shot of the Whitby, Redcar and Middlesbrough Union Railway’s viaduct over Staithes Beck, just south of the village itself.

Map extract from ‘Ordnance Survey Maps – Six-inch England and Wales, 1842-1952 – Yorkshire XIX.NW (circa 1895)‘. CC-BY-NC-SA by the The National Library of Scotland. Download here.

Described as a ‘light iron viaduct of novel construction’, it has an almost American feel to it and looks very out of place look to the modern eye. Given the failure of that particular line – even before the car and the van out competed it – It’s certainly not something we’ll ever see rebuilt again.

Prints of York’s Old Station

Not quite a Tour of Old York but, whilst scrabbling around in the Internet Archives library, I came across two rather wonderful illustrations of the first York station and the sidings that used to extend towards Lendal Bridge.

Map extract from ‘Ordnance Survey Maps – Six-inch England and Wales – Yorkshire Sheet 174 (circa 1853)‘. CC-BY-NC-SA by the The National Library of Scotland. Download here.
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Using Machine Learning for Geoglyph Detection

PNAS has an interesting paper on using AI and Machine Learning to try and identify new Nazca Pampa geoglyphs in the Peruvian Nazca Desert. It’s a fun little lunchtime skim with a few nice images of some of the newly found geoglyphs.

PNAS: AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose

Another look at Douglas Adams’ office

Another snippet of video and another quick look at Douglas Adams’ office space. Unlike my last post about Adams’ office, I’m having a little trouble narrowing down the source program – though the uploader of the original clip suggests that it may have been recorded around February 1995. If that’s true, then that suggests it was originally shown on a non-BBC channel as I cannot find anything in the BBC genome that references Adams during that period.

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