Word: railhead
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...tiny, ugly collection of frame bunkhouses and mills squats forlornly on the shore of remote Great Bear Lake, in Canada's Northwest Territories. It is 1,400 miles north of the nearest railhead (at Waterways, Alberta), and 26 miles south of the Arctic Circle, in a part of the continent bleak with long, cold winter nights. The village has no official name, but it is sometimes called Radium City. Last week it suddenly found itself part of an all but incredible world drama, for under its fir-bearded slopes lies the stuff of which atomic bombs are made...
Trucks were already moving supplies from the Ledo railhead over "Pick's Pike" to Myitkyina. The first convoy got through to Tengyueh in China via "Chiang's Lane," the narrow alternate roadway 50,000 coolies had hacked over 8,000-ft. mountains. When last-ditch Jap suicide squads are cleaned up, other convoys, using the old Burma Road from Wanting north, would help feed China's munitions-starved armies...
...monsoon-drenched jungles of Burma, an eleven-week campaign was ended and a new star pasted to the record of leathery Lieut. General Joseph W. Stilwell. His weary Chinese troops wrenched the last stubborn defender from the railhead village of Myitkyina. Thus fell the last Japanese stronghold in north Burma. Now Stilwell had only to hold off the Japs and bulldoze through 70 miles of jungle and mountain to complete his project for 1944-to reopen a road from India supply bases to China...
...flatcars and boxcars. Up front the tired locomotive leaked steam at the joints while soldiers loaded the train with supplies -chickens, pigs, a couple of fresh red and white slabs of meat crusted with flies. Finally the train lurched sorrowfully out in the heat up the line to the railhead...
...took working bloody, two hours to do twelve miles and we came to the railhead. Thirty miles up ahead were Japs. It was six o'clock by the time we found billets in an old factory dormitory that smelled like an abandoned pigsty-the kind whose odors are latent but deep, and revive each time you kick over a stale pile of dirt. We lay sleepless through the night...