Inter Express

Denmark Bound: The Burlington Air Express name is headed for Denmark. The Irvine-based freight forwarder has signed a deal that will result in Inter Express, a Copenhagen-based freight firm, using the Burlington name and handling the network's Danish freight. "Burlington seeks out high-profile, service-oriented companies to join its global network of over 490 offices," said Ray Wilson, Burlington's chief operating officer in the Atlantic region.

Denmark Bound: The Burlington Air Express name is headed for Denmark. The Irvine-based freight forwarder has signed a deal that will result in Inter Express, a Copenhagen-based freight firm, using the Burlington name and handling the network's Danish freight. "Burlington seeks out high-profile, service-oriented companies to join its global network of over 490 offices," said Ray Wilson, Burlington's chief operating officer in the Atlantic region.

Burlington Air Express said Monday that it has reached an agreement with Inter Express to allow the Copenhagen-based freight forwarder to use Burlington's name in shipments throughout Scandinavia. The new operations, based in Copenhagen, will include air, ocean and highway shipping services, warehousing and handling of high-value goods. Irvine-based Burlington Air Express, a $1-billion-a-year cargo handler with 490 offices worldwide, is a subsidiary of the Pittson Co., a Stamford, Conn.

A new passenger train set the world record today for the highest speed on rails, rocketing along at 298 m.p.h., the French national railroad announced. The train, carrying no passengers, broke the record of 253 m.p.h. set in May, 1988, by an Inter-City Express locomotive in West Germany. The record was set on a section of track in the wine-growing Loire Valley due to come into service next year.

Rescue workers continued to search for survivors, victims and clues in modern Germany's deadliest rail disaster. The official death toll stood at 92 in the wreck, which occurred in the northern town of Eschede when a dozen train cars and the rear engine of Inter-City Express 884 derailed while traveling at 125 mph. An official said about 60 older high-speed trains will be removed from service because of indications that a damaged wheel may have played a role in the crash.

The reason for a rattling that alarmed some passengers in the minutes before the crash of InterCity Express 884 now seems clear: Investigators said a broken wheel was the most likely cause of the disaster. The damaged wheel was on the first car behind the locomotive. Investigators found the fractured steel rim that circles the wheel and helps keep the train on the tracks lodged in the train car's rear wheels.

Hurtling with a momentum that piled train cars one atop another in twisted heaps of steel, Germany's fastest passenger train derailed and jackknifed Wednesday when the lead locomotive broke loose. State officials said at least 100 people were killed. Traveling at 125 mph, car after car slammed into the pylons of an overpass, bringing the bridge crashing down on the wreckage.

European trains are charming. European flights are civilized. European highways are scenic. Add these qualities, and you've got a European hydrofoil. Of the above options that tourists can consider in traveling from Budapest to Vienna (or vice versa), floating on or, more accurately, just above the blue Danube River is the most unusual. Mention hydrofoil and "nauseous" comes to my mind, no doubt the result of too many times across the English Channel.

Just when experts had decided how to stop it from leaning too much, the Tower of Pisa has sprung back a bit--one-tenth of an inch to be precise. Earlier this year, a panel of government-appointed experts said they had decided to gird the medieval tower with steel rings in a bid to keep the monument from tilting too fast.

Salvador Villar came to Southern California from Mexico in 1981 to head the U.S. ventures of Banco Nacional de Mexico, or Banamex, which was confidently expanding at a time when Mexico was flush with oil wealth. Then the bottom dropped out. Oil prices fell, Mexico went into a severe downturn, banks were nationalized. But Villar stayed north of the border, running Los Angeles' California Commerce Bank as a Banamex subsidiary.

We were dining under the stars one night in Asuncion, the beguiling, jasmine-scented old capital of Paraguay, when the lights suddenly went out across much of the city. Uh-oh, I thought, imagining mayhem. But the waiters seemed not at all perturbed, and they stopped serving only briefly to deliver candles to the tables. The outage lasted much of the rest of the meal, and I have no idea what caused it, but in an odd way it was the decisive moment that sold me on Asuncion . . .