Word: ballast
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Farrington, who had made the road flourish, president. He had rebuilt its rickety trackage, spent $100 million for new equipment and other improvements, and sent 20 streamlined Rock Island "Rockets" flashing over its new, heavy-ballast rails. The war boom which helped all railroads had mightily helped the Rock Island. During the last seven years its net profits were more than $80 million...
...staying there, it will be suspended from streamlined aluminum containers filled with aviation gasoline, which is considerably lighter than water and almost incompressible. Fully loaded, the bathyscaphe will weigh about 40 tons. Because the winches of the mother ship cannot support this weight, the gasoline and half the ballast must be added after the bathyscaphe is in the Water...
When Congress chopped the frayed mooring cable of OPA a year ago, there was a good deal of screeching around the big balloon of the U.S. economy. Harry Truman had already tossed out the ballast of wage controls. The cable was about to part anyhow. The first flight without controls soon made even 1940 prices look like something out of great-grandmother's album of souvenirs...
...Funchal in the Madeiras, where they put in to shift ballast, Skipper Seligman took on one of the trophies of the voyage. The horde of bumboat-men around the ship included one rascally old cicerone who presented a letter purporting to be from the captain of another ship...
...Tunnels as long as 470 yards were dug out by pick & shovel. Roadbeds were rebuilt by men carrying soil in baskets. Ballast-300,000 cubic meters of it-was made by men with steel hammers cracking big stones into little ones. As many as 80,000 laborers daily toiled to put the line through. Meanwhile, through UNRRA and CNRRA came desperately needed equipment to eke out the little on hand: almost a quarter-million ties from the U.S. and Canada, a few used locomotives and worn boxcars from Persia and Iraq, old rails of any weight, from any source...