Word: training
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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First he explains the mania that provoked him. Like such disparate figures as Molly Bloom and Richard Nixon, Theroux says he has always been lured by the siren song of a train whistle: "I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it." Thus his trip represented a once-in-a-lifetime act of massive self-indulgence, plus the chance to experience firsthand "the trains with the bewitching names: the Orient Express, the North Star, the Trans-Siberian." As an added bonus, the trips threw him together with several novels' worth of offbeat characters...
...like pace (one local in southern India makes 94 stops) gives him the not always pleasant chance to sniff out local differences. "The first condition of understanding a foreign country," T.S. Eliot once wrote, "is to smell it," and Theroux misses nothing, from the burned coal that permeates Indian train stations to the poisonous industrial fumes of Osaka...
Quality varies widely. One of the best-regarded juku, Tokyo's Nippon Shingaku Kyoshitsu (Japanese Entrance Examination School), is so popular that children commute to its Sunday sessions from distant areas by jet plane and bullet train. Some 2,600 pupils -all sixth-graders propping for the junior high entrance exam-attend the school. A typical class starts at 8:30 a.m. and continues for 50 minutes with the teacher asking questions and 100 pupils chanting back the answers. ("When did the Russo-Japanese war break out?" "When was the League of Nations formed?") Recently, a visitor asked...
...another $4.2 billion of its own earnings and funds from private investors for rehabilitation of the badly maintained and accident-prone system; it would lay 540 miles of new track a year and replace 3.4 million ties (in June, derailment of seven cars of an Erie-Lackawanna freight train in Scranton, Pa., which was attributed to the poor condition of the tracks, tied up traffic on the line for the better part of a day). If all goes as USRA plans, Conrail will survive losses of $631 million during its first three years, break Into the black...
...when John Cody arrived by train to become Archbishop of Chicago, he was greeted by the governor, the mayor, a crowd of well-wishers and three brass bands. Cody came to town with a reputation as the tough-minded, hard-driving archbishop who had quickly raised millions of dollars for parochial-school expansion in Kansas City, Mo., and later pushed through the racial integration of Roman Catholic schools in New Orleans. Lately the brass bands have been silent. The same stubborn streak that won Cody his early acclaim gradually worked against him in the nation's biggest archdiocese, which...