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.  

  • Little Dead School House
    Little Dead School House The road out of town is the only way the road seems to go. So few families remained in McLeod, North Dakota, Jan Herbranson ran out of kids at the old one-room school. Normally, that would spell the end of a place like McLeod. The school closed in 1986. But in this village of 50, four babies born. When they grew up, children returned to her little dead school house and so did Jan Herbranson.
  • Castle Tooth
    Castle Tooth Each evening Dr. Mort Copenhaven drove 900 feet up the side of Camelback Mountain to his own castle. It took him 13 years to chisel his home out of a cliff. He did all the work. Mort had no formal training, but he was a dentist. Figured that building a castle on the side of a mountain wouldn’t be much different than planting a false tooth.
  • Kids Soap Opera
    If you want to know what’s happening at Henderson school, you don’t join the Yearbook staff. You watch a Soap Opera at lunch time. Each Friday, the kids in the cafeteria share a second carton of milk with “The Growing Years.” A show they write and produce themselves about their own problems.
  • Marathon Mom
    Marathon Mom Vivian White is no taller than an August cornstalk, but — at age fifty-one — she was determined to run 6,500 miles. That was the distance from her home in Illinois to her son’s front-line Army post in Iraq. “Every mile that I jog,” she said, “brings him that much closer to being home, at least in my mind.” Vivian logged more than a thousand of those miles in the first 6 months after Brian went to war. She had 5,500 to go. Friends quickly realized that she would need help covering that distance.
  • Tea and Sugar Train
    Today, we’ll do a bit of time traveling. All aboard the Tea and Sugar train! Want to see our first American Story in foreign country? It aired on Halloween. Let’s see how kids celebrate in Australia’s Outback.