Word: trained
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...immobile plastic armrest, cleverly placed to minimize human contact), I began to read a book for Gov 10. Now any jock can tell you that the readings for that course are fairly heavy, requiring a great deal of concentration. I was really getting into it by the time the train wheezed into Route 128, and then the trouble began. A middle-aged woman who looked exactly like Margaret Hamilton flounced into the car, checked out the rows of empty seats, and decided to sit next to me. Had she been even close to sane, this would have been tolerable...
Several months later. I embarked on the most tortuous Amtrak adventure possible--a ten-hour ride to Utica, N.Y., to visit a friend at a nearby college. If you figure that the distance from Boston to Utica is about 300 miles, and that the train ride is ten hours (as opposed to five by car), it's easy to deduce that you're trucking along at the estimable rate of 30 m.p.h. Any way you cut it, the company you choose will probably begin to wear a little thin...
Also last week, a 101-car Illinois Central Gulf train jumped the tracks in Cades, Tenn. Among the derailed cars was one filled with caustic sodium hydroxide. Two days later 33 cars of a 91-car train, including one flatcar with a truck trailer containing 200 cases of flammable insecticide, derailed near Bowling Green, Ky. In neither accident were there any deaths or injuries...
...railroads themselves are responsible for inspecting and maintaining track and equipment. Officials of the railroads involved in the latest derailments insisted that they had taken all possible precautions. Said Donald T. Martin, an executive with Family Lines System, which operated the train that derailed in Waverly: "We do our utmost to keep our track and roadbed in good shape. We had inspected the track at Waverly two days before the accident. But there is no way to tell when a wheel will break. There's no way to tell when the metal will get tired...
...Frenchmen who were ready to resort to the traditional Gallic suitcase defense against the possibility of abrupt political change. Headlines bannered the news last week when French customs officials nabbed Lucien Barrière, president of the gambling casinos in Cannes and Deauville, as he traveled to Switzerland by train with $634,000 in diamonds and other gems in his luggage. The baubles, Barrière explained, were just something for his wife to wear on a skiing holiday in Gstaad...