When Google recently added street view for vast stretches of empty road across the middle of Australia, most people didn’t expect to find much of interest out there.

To be fair, those people were mostly right. However, every now and again the street view car did indeed pass something at least. In the deserts of South Australia on the Stuart Highway, we can see an approaching truck. Actually, it’s a really big truck!

Hang on, is that another truck driving dangerously close behind the first one? Nope, the first massive truck is actually pulling another trailer which carries… another truck – followed by another trailer!

The sign on the back of the huge vehicle kindly explains that this is a “ROAD TRAIN” – a kind of trucking used in remote areas of Australia, the United States, and Western Canada to move huge loads across vast distances. In the U.S. and Canada the terms “triples,” “Turnpike doubles” and “Rocky Mountain doubles” are more commonly used.

This particular road train is a “triple”, and is also “doubled-up” (carrying empty road train trailers), but some of these vehicles pull up to 4 trailers at a time. Australia has the largest and heaviest road-legal vehicles in the world, with some weighing up to 200 tonnes.

Previously on Google Sightseeing: Trucks Pulling Trucks

Thanks to Virtual Globe Trotting

Much to the annoyance of the tinfoil-hat privacy nuts, Street View’s spread across the globe continues with two launches today: Japan and Australia!

Japan has coverage in the following cities: Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama, Saitama, Chiba, Sendai, Sapporo, Hakodate, Kyoto and Tokyo.

The previously featured Tokyo Tower.

Australia has loads of Street View, with the following cities covered: Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Hobart, Adelaide, Cairns, Mt Isa, Canberra, Albany, Alice Springs, Rockhampton, Broome, Tamworth, Broken Hill, Karratha and Geraldton.

The previously featured Sydney Opera House.

There’s also new Street View in many US cities, including New Orleans, Baton Rouge, El Paso, Wichita, Savannah and Colorado Spring. Even more exciting, in the official announcement Google allude to a “hidden special surprise” in the US images. What could that be?

There’s hundreds of new streets covered across the three countries, so get exploring and let us know what you find!

Thanks to Google Maps Mania.

The Phoenix Shot Tower in Baltimore was erected in 1828 and stands at 71.3m, which at that time made it the tallest structure in the United States, as well as the world’s largest free-standing masonry tower¹.

The shot tower was invented by an Englishman in 1783, and soon spread across the globe as the preferred method of making lead shot for shotguns.

The process involves pouring molten lead through a copper sieve at the top of the tower, so that droplets fall the height of the tower, taking the form of tiny perfect balls during their descent. The lead then splash-lands in a water bath at the bottom, which sets the pellet.

These days shot is made using a centrifuge, so now only a handful of the once-ubiquitous shot towers exist worldwide.

The largest shot tower that was ever built is the 80.16m tall Clifton Hill Shot Tower in Melbourne.

Probably very impressive in 1882 when it was completed, but by the standards of today’s tallest towers, it’s tiny!

More info on shot towers at Wikipedia.

The Skyneedle is an 88m tower in Brisbane, Queensland, that was constructed for the World Expo ’88.¹ During the course of the Expo the tower shone a beam of light upwards that could be seen from 60km away.

After the Expo ended the tower was supposed to go to Tokyo Disneyland, but successful local hairdresser Stefan Ackerie felt that the Skyneedle should stay in Brisbane. He felt so strongly in fact, that he bought it himself and had it moved just 500m to his company’s headquarters.

The tower light was originally only used on special occasions, as it could potentially cause havoc for aircraft headed to the nearby Brisbane Airport, but in 2006 an electrical fault caused a fire near the top of the tower, and today it’s unclear if the light works at all.

There’s a bizarre bonus sight at the back of Stefan’s building too – an 8.5m long tennis racket, which was purportedly designed as a giant catapult?

Just what hairdresser Stefan planned to catapult is anyone’s guess.

More information on Expo ’88 and The Skyneedle at Wikipedia, and Stefan himself at his corporate website.

Thanks to Ashley Thistlethwaite.

It’s commonly quoted as fact that in nature, no food or vegetable is naturally blue.

This information was again disputed recently by the re-introduction of blue Smarties¹, this time using 100% natural seaweed extract to create the blue colour.

Additional support for the “blue-in-nature” brigade comes in the form of blue trees spotted on Google Earth. Firstly, in Australia’s Mount Annan Botanic Garden there’s a strikingly-blue tree.

The Garden’s website explains that the tree has been dead for many years, but is home to various types of termites and slaters.

So, it’s the termites that make the tree blue? Well, no. Further investigation reveals that the tree was in actual fact painted blue. For no particular reason.

Perhaps we’ll have better luck with this blurry shot of a blue tree in Northern California.

Unfortunately, this isn’t natural either. It’s the work of artist Claude Cormier, who decorated a perfectly normal tree with 70,000 blue Christmas baubles. Again, for no particular reason it would seem.

So perhaps natural blue is restricted to seaweed after all!

See a ground level pictures of the Australian tree and the American one on Flickr.

Thanks to Felippo, Logan and James.