Phil Hill

Phil Hill driving the iconic Ferrari 156 Sharknose leading teammate Wolfgang von Trips during the 1961 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps - Simon Ward

Belgian Grand Prix

Jim Clark driving his Lotus 33 Climax on the way to winning the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps

Jim Clark won the Belgian Grand Prix four years in a row: 1962, '63, '64 & '65.

Climax FWMV Mk.III Engine in a Lotus 24

Lotus 24 F1 car from 1962 fitted with a BRM P56 1498cc V8 engine

1938 FN Motocycle

FN racing motorcycle ridden by René Milhoux in 1938

1938 was the last year for FN before the war.

FN GP Works Machine 1938 500cc OHC

Above photo from Michel 67. He has several other photos of this machine, and a bunch of other motorcycles.

At the end of 1930, FN held 33 World Records.

Some motorcycle history sites:

• Motorcycle Timeline - 1938
• Classic Bike Hub - Reference: A to Z classic reference: FN – Fusi
• Cycle World - History of FN

Saroléa Motorcycles

Saroléa Colonette factory racer circa 1925

The Saroléa company was established in 1850 in Belgium as an arms factory. They started making bicycles in 1892 and in 1901 they started making motorcycles.

1901, the first Saroléa motorcycle

 

1951, 600cc Grand Tourisme, with rocker arms

I like the way this one looks. The company stopped production in 1963.

2017 MANX7 Electric Motorcycle

In 2010 two brothers resurrected the name and started a company to produce electric motorcycles. They have an extensive history of the brand. All pictures except the first one are from their website.

Citadel de Dinant. Belgien

Citadel de Dinant. Belgien
Jigsaw puzzle

Built in 1815.

Viaduct Conques

Railway Bridge over the River Semois in Belgium

We started watching The Break, a murder mystery series, on Netflix last night. In French, with subtitles. The story starts off with a local soccer star falling off of this bridge. It's a tall bridge and the water is not very deep, so he dies. Question is, was it suicide or murder? Seems like we've seen a bunch of European murder mysteries lately. Not quite sure what the appeal is, but we seem to enjoy them.

The town named in the show is not the same as the town where it was filmed, which is not near the river. The show is set in Heiderfeld, Belgium, it was shot in Sainte-Ode and the bridge is between Herbeumont and Conques. They are not too far apart and all three are about 80 miles southeast of Brussels.

The bridge is kind of big, which prompts me to go looking for it. Something that big should show up easy on Google Maps, but even big things require a clue. Okay, big is a relative term. If you are looking for a continent, knowing which planet to search should make it easy, though just knowing what star system it was could be enough. Any kind of man made feature requires bit more precision.

Poking around I found a couple of web sites that seemed to know something, so I sent an inquiry. I do that occasionally and every once in a while I eventually get a useful response. I sent off three inquiries this morning, and this afternoon I got two responses. I am telling the family about this, asking what kind of people have time to answer email inquiries on Christmas Eve? And they all gave me knowing looks. Oh. People like me. Hey! My kind of people! Ooo-Rah!

The owner of the first photo, Steven House of Green River Canoes, gave me a clue, and a little more searching turned up some other photos. I didn't find out anything more about the bridge other than it was built 1910 and is 500 feet long. Here's some photos. Click on the captions to visit the site.

Fenced walkway on the Viaduct van Conques over the River Semois in Belgium
Our detective climbs over this fence during the course of his investigation.

Viaduct Conques on the Semois between Herbeumont and Conques

Viaduct Conques 1910. I am pretty sure this is under construction.

And here's a map:

Viaduct Conques

Using Google Earth to look at places with hills is a real treat. Click on the 3D button (just above the zoom controls), then by holding down the control key and moving the mouse, you can pan and tilt your view. It's really quite spectacular. You can get a great sense of the landscape by doing this.

Here's the railroad map:

Viaduct Conques Railroad

Using the Open Railway Map is a little different than using Google Maps. Finding this bridge on the railroad map took some fiddling.

While I am fooling with maps, I am having a hard time locating a spot found on a Google Map on Google Maps (wait, what? Trust me, if doesn't matter). The upshot is all these places with their winding roads and winding rivers and funny furrin name all begin to look alike, so I copied the lat and long from one url to another, and since I was doing it by hand (sometimes you just get tired of trying to slide the mouse over one more pixel so it will pick up the last letter in a phrase), I didn't type the whole number. I figured three decimal places should be sufficient, after all one degree is 69 miles, so one-one-thousandth of a degree should be (um, 70*5000 is 350,000, divided by a thousand gives 350) about 350 feet. And switching between the two maps causes the bridge to jump about half of an inch, which is about 100 scale feet, which is roughly half of 350, so good enough.

Update January 2017: Ms. Catherine from Infrabel, the Belgian railway people, points me to the French Wikipedia article about this rail line. Google's translated version can be found here. Near as I can make out it played a critical part in WWI, and maybe in WW2.