Shangai Tower Today we’re talking about elevators. This is the Shanghai tower- the second tallest building in the world behind the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Now, building tall buildings is a bit of a…uhh… rooster measuring contest and nowhere likes flaunting their flightless birds more than China and the UAE. The Shanghai Tower, which cost $2.5 billion to build, stretches to over 2,000 feet or 600 meters and has 127 stories. As a point of comparison, if you put eight 747’s on top of each other, the Shanghai Tower would still be taller mostly because, according to my engineering degree, that’s not a structurally sound building. Also Read: What is the fastest object ever made? Now, part of the difficulty in having buildings this tall is that people, who mostly come from the ground, need to get to the top of the building quickly. If people can’t get to the top of the building easily and quickly, they won’t want to buy property in the building, which I’m told is a pretty imp...
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| Queen driving Range Rover Credit: UK Press via Getty Images |
The Queen is the Queen of lots of places—Milton Keynes, Peterborough, Derby, the list goes on. What that means is that she has had to travel a lot in order to make sure that as many people as possible in as many places as possible get waved at.
In fact, she is supposedly the most travelled head-of-state in history, probably at least partially since she’s been Queen since the early jurassic period, almost. While she’s cut back on international travel in recent years, she still has, like, a lot of houses that she needs to visit.
She typically starts the year at Sandringham House, stays there through early February, then heads back to London to start her rotation of Buckingham Palace during the week, Windsor castle during the weekends, which she maintains,except for a few longer stays at Windsor, until the end of June.
It’s at that point that she heads up to the Palace of Holyrood house, in Edinburgh, for a week, before heading further up north in early-August to finish out the summer at Balmoral Castle, and then heading back down to London where she stays until it’s time to go to Sandringham House for the holidays.
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That’s a lot of travel, especially for a 93 year old. While of course a life travelling between palaces sounds nice, she has to do lots of waving along the way which makes it a tiring lifestyle. Now, starting with the closest, to get to Windsor, the Queen travels like a normal person and uses a motorcade—good, done.
Going to Sandringham, though, she typically takes the train to the nearby King’s Lynn station before driving the last bit. Now, what makes this surprising is that she actually just takes the public, regularly-scheduled train with normal, non-Royal, muggles on-board.
Of course, to keep up appearances, she does ride in first class. For going to Scotland, to either Holyrood house or Balmoral, the Queen usually takes her private train, known as the Royal Train. This allows her to sleep along the way, and even to make trips from Edinburgh, where Holyrood house is, to areas around Scotland as she fulfilled her duties in relative comfort.
Of course, the unfortunate bit is that, despite having such a rail loving ruler, the best compliment you can make about the UK’s rail system is that it’s better than the US’. The Queen has, in her reign, of course had to travel outside the UK quite a bit considering that she is the Queen in a number of other nations worldwide, and also the main figurehead for the UK.
While she’s ramped down the quantity of this travel recently, she still has done some in the past decade and this aspect of hertravel is... complicated. You see, by policy, the monarch herself does not travel on commercial flights. While other members of the royal family do,with some even being spotted on Ryanair, it’s considered far too complicated and risky for the Queen.
There are, in fact, a decent number of rules for royal flight including, for example, that no two heirs to the throne are meant to fly on the same plane. In practice, following this rule would be quite difficult since, for one, Prince Harry and each of his three kids would have to each travel separately so the Queen has given permission for this rule to be violated. Now, even though the Queen is not meant to travel on commercial flights, she does not have her own aircraft.
The British government does have a VIP configured version of an aerial tanker configured version of an Airbus A330—yeah, I know it’s complicated—and it's said that the Queen has first dibs on this. If the Queen’s not using it, then Prince Charles has second dibs, then the Prime Minister, then British government ministers. This hierarchy has led to some tricky situations—in 2017, the Prime Minister was forced to charter a plane since Prince Charles was using the government plane.
Ministers, at the bottom of the totem pole, rarely ever get to use the plane. When he was foreign secretary, Boris Johnson complained to reporters about the bathroom at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He said, “I think it’s great, but it seems to be very difficult to get hold of. It never seems to be available. I don’t know who uses it, but it never seems to be available.” Oh, actually, I’m told he was complaining about the plane but, really, applicable to either.
Of course, the Queen herself has never used this plane since she hasn’t even left the UK since its introduction in 2015. When the Queen has travelled outside of Europe,though, the last time being 2011 with her trip to Australia, she typically charters long-haul aircraft from British Airways. The airline would reconfigure their aircraft with a sort-of bedroom suite for the Queen and her husband and Heathrow airport, where they would normally leave from, even has a private lounge specifically for the Queen And her family.
Chartering a huge aircraft like this does,of course, come at quite a cost for the royal purse, but given the eerily similar appearance of the Queen of England and the Queen of Australia, it’s always been considered a worthy expense,at least by those who get to decide, in order to tie the Commonwealth together.