Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 7, 2025
The different levels varied from ten to twenty feet one above the other, each with a railroad on it, back and forth along which incessantly rumbled and screeched dirt-trains full or empty, halting before the steam-shovels, that shivered and spouted thick black smoke as they ate away the rocky hills and cast them in great giant handsful on the train of one-sided flat-cars that moved forward bit by bit at the flourish of the conductor's yellow flag.
Already a long train of battered flat-cars, piled with sluice-props and roughly hewn sleepers, was moving slowly off into the brooding forest gloom, when I came in sight of the track; but I developed a gratifying and unexpected burst of speed, shouting all the while.
New gangs of shovellers strung on flat-cars were being pushed forward. Down the hill, spent and disabled engines were returning from the front, and while they took sidings, fresh engines, close-coupled, steamed slowly like leviathans past them up the hill. The moment the track was clear, the private car was backed again down the ridge.
The huge engine came storming up the grade on the new line, pushing its three flat-cars, which were black with clinging men. On the car nearest the locomotive, where the dazzling beam of the headlight pricked him out for her, stood Winton, braced against the lurchings of the train over the uneven track.
A quarter of a mile down the line Buck Ogilvy applied the brakes and eased her down to twenty miles per hour. At the junction with the main line Buck backed briskly up into the Laguna Grande woods, and coupled to the two loaded flat-cars. The woods-gang scrambled aboard the flats, and the train pulled out for Sequoia.
Winton had raced back with his news of the catastrophe, and the camp was alive with men clustering like bees and swarming upon the flat-cars of the material-train to be taken to the front. While she looked, studiously ignoring the man behind her, Virginia saw the big octopod engine clamoring up the grade. In a twinkling the men were off and at work.
"Pennington talking. What has young Cardigan done about those rails I sold him from the abandoned spur up Laurel Creek?" "He have two flat-cars upon ze spur now. Dose woods-gang of hees she tear up dose rails from ze head of ze spur and load in ze flat-cars." "The ears haven't left the Laurel Creek spur, then?" "No, she don't leave yet."
Before and beyond were pounding rock drills, belching locomotives, there arose the rattle and bump of long trains of flat-cars on many tracks, the crash of falling boulders, the snort of the straining steam-shovels heaping the cars high with earth and rock, everywhere were groups of little men, some working leisurely, some scrambling down into the rocky bed of the canal or dodging the clanging trains, all far below and stretching endless in either direction, while over all the scene hovered a veritable Pittsburg of smoke.
Along the waterside ran the tracks of our Terminal and Belt Line System, on which trains of flat-cars always stood, engaged in the work of carrying away the cliffs, in which they were aided and abetted by giant derricks and the fiends of dynamite and nitro-glycerin. Limekilns burned all the time, turning the companionable gray ledges into something offensive and corrosive.
He hurried away to his automobile, leaving a lieutenant in charge of the squad. "Also in the meantime, young man," Colonel Pennington announced, "you will pardon me if I take possession of my locomotive and flat-cars. I observe you have finished unloading those rails." "Help yourself, Colonel," Bryce replied with an assumption of heartiness he was far from feeling. "Thank you so much, Cardigan."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking