Word: train
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...appointments with people who give her instruction in everything from helicopter flying to horsemanship. Or she just goes shopping. She will buy staggeringly expensive furniture only to ship it off to storage. She buys $50 Dunhill pipes and smokes them while she plays with her electric trains. The trains come in kits from Germany. She assembles them herself and has them running all over a bedroom. "I never had any toys as a child," she says, "and now I can afford them. I'm going to have the darnedest train layout you ever saw. I've ordered...
These satirical passages are among Miss McCarthy's cleverest: "But the red-letter day in Mr. Andrews' life was the day he became a Trotskyite! . . . The figure of the whiskered war commissar wearing a white uniform and riding in his armored train or reading French novels during Politburo meetings captured his imagination. He demanded that Mr. Schneider recruit him to the Trotskyite group...
Moscow-bound Train No. 7 had just pulled into Naushki, the Soviet railroad checkpoint on the Mongolian frontier. Suddenly, swarms of Red Chinese students dashed out of the coaches and into the station, tied themselves with belts to block the entrances. Then, in the words of astounded Stationmaster Prokop Mikhailov, they "emptied their bowels and bladders on the floor, in spittoons, and on benches. And the men's room was only a few steps away...
Cause of the messy melee was the discovery of anti-Moscow propaganda in the compartments of the 19-man Red Chinese train crew and the 73 students aboard the Moscow-Peking express. When four Russian border guards and customs officials tried to confiscate the documents, mobs of Red Chinese defiantly blocked the aisles. Attempting to fight their way through the crowd, the hapless Soviet officials were pummeled, scratched and bitten; finally they were locked into a compartment for five hours...
When the Russians hastily assembled a replacement train for the onward journey to Moscow, the Peking crew locked the emergency brakes on their own equipment, raised red signals, and moved cranes to blockade the rails. In the end, the harried Russians were able to force the Chinese train-and its rambunctious passengers-back over the frontier into Mongolia, and with a sigh of relief, Soviet trainmen chugged off toward Moscow in the replacement train. It might well be the last trip in a long time for the Moscow-Peking express. The Kremlin dashed off a scathing official protest to Peking...