Word: tunneling
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...said. "None of you have to go on this mission if you don't want to. Shortly before midnight we will transfer to the Mansfield. About a thousand yards offshore we will leave the Mansfield in a small boat. Our job will be to mine a railroad tunnel near the beach...
...chance of being seen in the inky blackness. Sixty yards offshore a white headlight seemed to spot the whaleboat for a minute. Then it shifted back inland. All hands flattened in the bottom of the boat. Then they heard the rumble of a freight train heading toward the tunnel that was their target for the night...
...grass smelled like heather, one of the men later remem bered. Commander Porter stationed two marines on the beach near their boat. After clambering up a small hill, sometimes slipping and sometimes falling with their heavy packs of explosive on their backs, the men discovered they were above the tunnel. Carefully they worked down to one entrance. It was a single track tunnel, blasted out of solid rock, about a quarter of a mile long, curving slightly. Using shovels they had brought with them, they dug into the railroad bed. When their shovels rang too loudly they went down...
Hamilton's prop men designed a thin, knife-edged blade of conventional, square-tipped shape that would move fast enough all along its length to leave shock waves behind. This did the trick. Tested in a wind tunnel, a scale model of the new propeller proved to be 80% efficient at 600 m.p.h. No shock waves roiled the air-flow over its smooth surfaces. Shock waves are not quick enough...
Last week, after 22 years and still no sign of a tunnel, the money went by default to secondary legatees, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Bowdoin College. Corpus Christi officials were in a no-comment mood about the whole thing. The official attitude: the tunnel had always seemed rather unnecessary...