Europe’s Unluckiest Train Station Gets New Lease Of Life As Hotel
The Guardian, 19 Jul 2021
It earned the nickname “Titanic of the mountains”, but now the monumental and ill-fated train station at Canfranc is to get a new life as a five-star hotel, 51 years after the international rail link across the Pyrenees closed. The story of Canfranc, a village more than 1,000 metres (3,280ft) above sea level on the Franco-Spanish frontier, is one of vainglorious ambition and abject failure, of incompetence and corruption, of intrigue, smuggling and a century-long run of bad luck. Spain wanted to show that it was capable of building something on the scale of Europe’s great “railway cathedrals”, says Alfonso Marco, author of El Canfranc, historia de un tren de leyenda (Canfranc, the story of a legendary train). “By the time it was built it already belonged, conceptually and technically, in the 19th century,” he told the Guardian. The problem was that the station was conceived in 1853 but not completed until 1928.
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Is This the Final Photograph of the Titanic?
Snopes.com, 16 Jul 2021
Snopes looks into whether or not a photograph (Morrogh Image) is the final photograph of Titanic. After consulting with Ken Marschall and another expert, it likely was not the last one. It appears to have been taken a few minutes before the Odell Image (taken by Kate Odell on the tender heading ashore). Which makes the Odell image still the last and final photograph of Titanic as she heads out to sea, and into history.
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‘The Apparition Screamed Out ‘Waratah! Waratah!’: Dundee Ship Richard King And ‘Australia’s Titanic’
The Courier, 16 Jul 2021
The Waratah was sailing to Cape Town but she disappeared from sight into the mist with her 211 passengers and crew in July 1909. The story of the Waratah has often been compared to that of the Titanic, which sank three years later. As such, the Waratah has been referred to variously as the “Titanic of the Southern Ocean” and “Australia’s Titanic”. The Richard King was one of the ships that took part in an exhaustive but unsuccessful search for the Waratah. Numerous attempts to salvage it and a few sightings have been reported, with none proving to be true. No one has ever found a trace of the ship and this great maritime mystery is up there with the Mary Celeste and the Flying Dutchman.
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What Titanic Left Behind: This Forgotten Mansion Was Owned By A Family Taken By Maritime Tragedy
Thetravel.com, 15 Jul 2021
The nearly-forgotten home of Lynnewood Hall was once considered to be one of the finest mansions in the country from the Gilded Age. It also held the title as being the finest home in the state of Pennsylvania but with so many Neo-Classical Revival features, that was not a tough challenge to overcome. What more interesting – and tragic – is the family who once owned this mansion, and how their lives were intertwined with that of the biggest maritime disaster in history: The Titanic.
https://youtu.be/yiLgiIFcYI0