Word: rails
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...wide, tough undercarriages and soft tires, on sod fields. If it works, and plain fields turn out to be usable as jet airports, the Soviet potential for striking out suddenly from hundreds of places would be immeasurably increased. Airfields are being strengthened, but there are few indications of extensive rail and road building, the kind that would be necessary for a long, sustained war, as distinct from a quick blitz. Western intelligence officers regard 1952 as "the big year" of supreme tension, but the cautious hunch of almost every qualified observer...
...Miles of Track. Importing twice what it exports, the country must write its budget in red. The kingdom's rail transport consists of one steam engine, two diesels, a few ramshackle freight cars, and only 200 miles of track to run them on. Between Tripoli, which is the country's largest city, and Fezzan, its largest province, there are no telephone, telegraph or radio connections. Nor is there much homogeneity between the three provinces. Except for the late years of Italian rule (1935 until World War II), Tripolitania (pop. 800,000), Cyrenaica (pop. 300,000) and Fezzan...
...northeastern coast, a party of British commandos and U.S. marines put out in small boats from the fast transport Horace A, Bass. The Americans were serving with the 41st Royal Marine commandos, commanded by Lieut. Colonel Ferris Grant, a Londoner. The raiders' objective: the Communist east-coast rail line along which vital supplies were flowing from Vladivostok to Wonsan...
Next night, the 41st carried off a similar attack a few miles farther north. This time the raiders had to scale a cliff before reaching the rail line, but they blew a stretch of track into a mess of twisted steel. Purpose of the two attacks was not only to slow down the enemy's southward flow of war supplies, but to remind him that the lull in the Korean fighting was not by any means a total ceasefire. It was one more oddity of an odd war that after weeks of palaver over where a truce line should...
Japanese agents have also spotted the fingers of a fast-lengthening Russian rail and highway system, linking these troop dispositions and reaching toward the North Pacific shore. Partly completed: a northern trunk of the Trans-Siberian railway, from Lake Baikal eastward to the lower Amur River region. Under construction: a highway from the mid-Siberian maneuvering and training center of Yakutsk eastward toward Anadyr, near the tip of Siberia, facing Alaska; a railroad from Nikolaevsk to Kamchatka, circling the Sea of Okhotsk and making Japan's northern water flank in effect a Russian lake...