Word: railroads
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...estimable Ernest M. Frimbo is the Baron Munchausen of railroads, with a puff of Lucius Beebe and a chuff of Cervantes thrown in. Frimbo-the "world's greatest railroad buff'-is the brain child of Rogers E.M. Whitaker, who has himself bumpety-thumped across 2,334,000 miles of rails from Moscow, Russia to Moscow, Ill. By inventing Frimbo-lexicographer, gourmet, jazz fan, connoisseur of contessas and, of course, compulsive investigator of trains-Whitaker has transmuted what might have been a soda-water sermon on the glory and decline of the trains into a Jules Vernean adventure that...
...until next year. Layoffs related to the coal strike last week totaled nearly 20,000. At U.S. Steel, 18,000 employees were out of work or put on short weeks because of the mine stoppage. Bethlehem Steel will lay off 2,800 workers this week. The Illinois Central Gulf Railroad and Norfolk & Western Railway Co. have laid off a total of 770 employees...
...prospects of returns and appreciation may be. Using the laws of probability ("The most commonly thrown dice total is seven, and you have a 1-in-6 chance of rolling it"), she lists properties in order from the most frequently landed on (Illinois Avenue) to the least (Pennsylvania Railroad...
...memories were often harsh. The son of a shiftless, intemperate father, Shaw began tending the hardscrabble Alabama soil almost as soon as he could walk. When he was not plowing or picking cotton, he cut and hauled timber, hacked out railroad crossties, carved ax handles, wove baskets. At 21 he married, left his servitude to his father and entered another. Few economic systems can have been as cruelly deceptive as the one saddled on black Southern sharecroppers. They leased their land from whites, who also paid for the "furnishin' "-feed, fertilizer, tools-they needed to farm. At harvesttime sharecroppers...
Perhaps the author gives himself away when he discusses the "points" of the railroad track at the end of the book. Watson must regularly jump off the train to switch these points so that it will follow the route of the sinister Baron's locomotive. Over and over again our chronicler writes, the points must be switched: "And the points--the points are all wrong!" One can't help but sense that he is pointing fun at the defects of the traditional detective novel...