| Fast rail offering hip personalised travel
E-TICKETS, on-board DVD rentals, events, and even new encounters French rail's new iDTGV trains are testing a new way of travel. Music blares from a speaker in a bustling bar and conversations get louder as customers just out of Paris meetings trickle in, settle down and order drinks. The barman hands over a beer, spilling a little as the brightly-coloured buffet car on the top deck of a customised high-speed TGV train rolls into its three-hour journey to the Mediterranean port city of Marseille. Joined to a regular TGV train, this iDTGV, playing on the French word "idee" or "idea", is operated privately, but owned by the national SNCF rail company and designed as a laboratory for future rail travel. Planned party train on the way The iDTGV was launched in December 2004 and offers cheaper tickets, internet reservations, and services aimed at pleasing passengers, including a soon-to-be launched party train, to help the SNCF better compete with low cost airlines.
Cowtown Confidential: Rockfest, Pride festivals might be looking for ...
Now that Liberty Memorial's World War I museum is up and running, word on the street is the annual Rock 98.9 FM Rockfest wilding and the Show Me Pride festival may have to look elsewhere for a home. "We're trying to boost our tourism, and now there's nowhere to hold a festival with over 5,000 people," says Pride organizer Flo. "Rockfest is moving to Kansas. They're moving to the Speedway. We're still looking." Not so fast. There's more to the story. While the Liberty Memorial Association was indeed planning to limit the size of the festivals it will host, it has re-entered discussions on how it might work with Rockfest, says LMA spokeswoman Denise Rendina. "Rockfest is still talking to us about doing it here," she says. "It started out to be more about Rockfest than Show Me Pride.
So Efficient, L.E.D.’s Are Now Fashion Plates, Too
L.E.D.'s are longer lasting, more compact and consume less electricity. Familiar as indicator lamps and later in powerful flashlights, the solid-state lights first found their way into cars as brake lights, an ideal application because L.E.D.'s illuminate more quickly than traditional lamps with wire filaments. Even if the difference is measured in milliseconds, L.E.D.'s can alert drivers sooner and help to prevent rear-end collisions. Until recently, however, they have been about 10 times as expensive as traditional lights, according to LEDs magazine, a trade publication. Now that is changing. Luxury cars are using the diode lamps in abundance, and they have already migrated onto more affordable vehicles. "L.E.D.'s have finally become cheap enough that we can spread the goodness around," said J Mays, group vice president for design and chief creative officer of the Ford Motor Company.
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