Word: railroads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Left Bank across from the Louvre, with a panoramic view of the Tuileries. Originally, the Cours des Comptes had stood here, and after the ravages of the Paris Commune of 1871, its melancholy, fire-gutted ruins remained untouched for nearly 30 years. Then, in 1898, the Orleans railroad company bought the site and raised on it a railroad station with a built-in hotel, serving as the terminus of lines from southwestern France. Its architect, Victor Laloux (1850-1937), did not approach the genius of men like Charles Garnier, who created the Paris Opera, and Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, France...
...Gare d'Orsay was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel, but its glories lasted only 40 years. By 1939 changes in railroad technology had downgraded it to a commuter station. In 1969 the last train left, and the place was abandoned: a rusting abode of cats and pigeons, whose damp silence was occasionally broken by film units; Orson Welles and Bernardo Bertolucci are among the directors who have sought evocative locations in its Piranesian gloom. Meanwhile developers covetously eyed it, dreaming of the slow-motion arc of the wrecker's ball. In 1971 the French government, under...
Then we received a telegram saying that the trial of Alexei Smirnov was beginning. On May 12, I went to Moscow. Smirnov would be tried the next morning.* I pictured the stairs to the bridge over the railroad tracks -- it had to be crossed to reach the courthouse. So many had been tried there: Bukovsky, Krasnov-Levitin, Tverdokhlebov, Orlov (Yuri Orlov, a dissident, and his wife Irina Valitova are being released in the wake of the Daniloff affair), Tanya Velikanova, Tanya Osipova, among...
Then came trouble. Critics in the House of Representatives argued vociferously that the price for Conrail was too low and that a public offering of Conrail stock would reap much more than the private railroad was prepared to offer. Norfolk's concession puts Conrail back on the siding...
Having one of your own is a phrase with a ring to it, and since the mid- 1960s, when only one privately owned railroad car rolled in the entire country, it is a ring that more than a few people have answered. Railroad slang for privately owned stock is "private varnish," and a magazine by that name is sent to some 3,000 train buffs. The American Association of Private Railroad Car Owners has 157 full and 240 associate members, and 230 cars are registered in Amtrak's Washington headquarters, most of them lavishly furnished and all fully functional...