Tea and Sugar Train

by | Apr 19, 2026 | Blog, Hiding in History's Shadow

This train travels the longest stretch of railroad track on earth without a turn — 299 miles.  There’s a bank car, theater car, grocery store car, a car filled with doctor’s offices, one that has a chapel.  Sixty train cars.  A mile long.  Most do not have a passage way between them, so people who work in one seldom see those who work in another. The “Tea and Sugar” meanders more than a thousand miles across South Australia, stopping whenever someone waves it down.  Its arrival in remote places is the social event of the week.  All the families linger for hours buying impulsively, trying to extend the moment when there is laughter and community.  

  • That Last Howard Johnson’s
    This a month of memories. I remember a time when summer was served in 28 flavors. Howard Johnson’s ice cream was every where. When I was a kid, the brand was as well known as Coca Cola. I had my last taste in the state where it began. The last Howard Johnson restaurant was closing in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
  • Simpler Sign Language
    A 21 year old graduating senior at the University of Virginia has developed a simpler sign language for autistic children and stroke victims, helping some to communicate for the very first time. Micki Cassagne brings life to children crouching in the darkness of their minds.
  • Places No One Else Has Photographed
    David Tatnall worked as a janitor until he saved enough to go looking for places no one else has photographed. His was not the dry Australia of foreign imagination. Tatnall hiked the high mountain forest east of Melbourne where the rain melts the landscape into a vivid softness.
  • Surviving the Great Depression
    It is an accident of history that old stories are recalled in black and white. Familiar, faded images. Always the same. They never tell it all. During the Great Depression of the 1930’s, farmers from half a continent funneled into California looking for work. Leo Hart helped their children find a way out of poverty. He taught arithmetic in an air plane. Children with the highest marks got to taxi it around. Those kids ended up owning mining companies and supermarkets. They became college professors, engineers and judges. Their teacher emphasized what they could become, not what they were.
  • Saying NO to Money
    West Texas has one of the most sparsely populated counties in the country, 647 square miles of nothing but sagebrush, rattlesnakes and sand.  It has one town.  Only 110 people live there.  So few, the mayor bought something unusual to let them sleep late.