Thanks to this week's launch of Google Street View in Canada, our Canadian correspondent Ian has been able to prepare a grand tour of Canada's Railway Hotels, in 2 parts. It is often said that Canada was built on the…

It’s Island Week 4 here at GSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. For about a week. The last remaining fragments of the formerly immense French Empire in North America are the islands which make up the Territorial…

The Alameda Trench is a 16-km train route which runs 10m below ground-level through the centre of Los Angeles. Trains descend into the trench near Greenleaf Boulevard in the south and rise back to the surface at 25th Street to…

Sayano–Shushenskaya was - until a recent accident - the largest power plant in Russia, and the sixth largest hydroelectric plant in the world. The main feature of the power station is a dam 245 m high and over a kilometre…

The city of Ashgabat - capital of Turkmenistan - is dominated by monuments to one man's megalomania - former President-for-Life Saparmurat Niyazov. Take, for example, the 75m tall Arch of Neutrality, which he subtly topped with a 12m gold-plated statue…

A tripoint is a geographical location where three borders meet - most notably those of different countries, but also (to a lesser extent) counties, states, provinces, etc. While many of the world's 157 national tripoints are located in the middle…