Word: trained
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...east, the moonlit rails turn molten in the Popsicle-or-ange sunrise. This is the time of day a kangaroo likes to lick the dew off the steel track. Or when a yellow-eyed dingo, Australia's coyote, will stand its ground and stare sourly at the train while a spindly-legged emu, the local version of an ostrich, will try to outrun the 3,300-h.p. diesel express...
...morning the train is in Menindee, where paddle-wheelers used to p!y the café-au-lait-colored Darling River. From Menindee, a water pipe runs beside the track for 75 miles to the parched mining city of Broken Hill. A man must live in Broken Hill for eight years just to qualify for work in the lead, zinc and silver mines of this hard, uncompromising, union-ruled town. The train flits by a clump of "humpies" (aborigine huts built of empty gasoline drums). The kids wave...
...Peterborough, a few passengers change for Adelaide. There the yard-masters have the maddening job of sorting out rolling stock for three different gauge tracks. In Gladstone, east-and westbound trains stop side by side to swap crews. "Be careful you get back on the right one," warns the chief conductor, Joe Ford, as he spots a passenger alighting dangerously between the two identical silver liners. By nightfall the train is heading into the "back o' beyond," where tiny settlements along the track still depend on a fortnightly supply train called the "tea and sugar...
This ditty is recited by the children of Cook. They are up at dawn to watch the train refuel before it heads across the 500-mile plain of Nullarbor (Latin for "not any tree"). The desolate limestone plateau is covered with sea fossils, saltbush, and red-flowering wild hops. Weird subterranean winds whistle through caves honeycombing the limestone, and whoosh with an eerie trumpeting from gaping blowholes. Over one stretch known as "the long straight," the track runs dead ahead for 297 miles, the longest straightway railroad in the world. There was a "loco" driver at Cook named Kevin Smith...
...finally into the first suburban fringes of Perth. It is 6:45 a.m. Kitchen lights glow in the freshly painted frame houses backed against the track. The sleeping-car porters rap hard on the compartment doors to make sure all passengers are awake. A disc jockey, piped into the train from a Perth radio station, is playing his morning selection. "Now here's a good one," he says, and the song begins, "Pardon me, boy, is that the Indian-Pacific...