Word: railways
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...terrific roar, and the line vanished from sight behind a spouting column of black dust and smoke." So wrote T. E. Lawrence, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, of his World War I dynamiting raids on the Hejaz Railway, the 782-mile "pilgrim express" whose single track linked Damascus with the Islamic holy city of Medina. Lawrence of Arabia reduced most of the line to a snarl of sprung steel and splintered ties. Nearly half a century of desert winds and systematic depredation have done the rest. Bedouins ransacked the abandoned stations, pried loose wooden ties for cooking fires. In Medina...
...Says he: "Sister Bridget won't be chairing the Tory conference at Blackpool, my bird-watching brother Henry won't be next Secretary of State for Scotland, I will not be sent to the U.N., and Edward, my youngest brother, who spent four years on the Burma railway as a prisoner of war, will not be Minister without Portfolio in the Far East...
...answer, but we see the challenge clearly and the need to meet it all along the line. So do not be misled into thinking us soft. Some of our enemies made that mistake. Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers. The memorial to him in London is a railway station called Waterloo. Shopkeepers we may be, but neither our principles nor our alliances are for sale...
...railroads are now willing to lavish funds on this lucrative freight operation. Last week in Chicago, the Chicago & Northwestern Railway dedicated its new Proviso Piggyback Plaza, a 20-acre, twelve-track staging point for road trailers moving by train. This week the Baltimore & Ohio is completing an $11 million project in which 18 tunnels are being enlarged, or are being bypassed altogether, to clear the way for piggy back trains moving west. The Southern is busy on a similar $35 million program on the line between Cincinnati and Chattanooga...
...Catholic Pope: they feel that they have a right to an audience with him. And Popes have always responded, each in his own way. The languid Leo X of the Renaissance grandly received his subjects on horseback while at the hunt, and Pius IX had his own railway car to make whistlestop visits through the papal states. The general audiences of the ascetic Pius XII were like an encounter with a saint. John XXIII's were folksy-until sickness and duty made him give them up. The mood of Pope Paul's audiences is somewhere in between...