The transportation industry has been with us for a very long time and so has the language associated with it, although it changes from time to time as the means of transport changes. Consider, first, how many methods of transportation there are, and how many facets of language have come about as a result. From the horse and buggy days of the early Twentieth Century, we have progressed to an age of fast sports cars, homes on wheels, megaships, and the Boeing Shuttle Carrier, a craft large enough to ferry a space shuttle.



Family transportation has gone from the buckboard to the compact car to the minivan to the monster motor home, a house on wheels as long as a semi-truck and trailer. In the process, it's added intriguing terms to our transportation dictionary

Some terms have various meanings, even within the industry. ?Ballast? is heavy material put into the hold of a ship to enhance stability. According to our own transport dictionary it is gravel or rock packed onto a railroad bed to hold the track level, inhibit plant growth and distribute the load. Ballast, of course, brings with it a need for a ?ballast fork,? a steel tool similar to a pitchfork but with more tines, closer together, to shovel rock. A traffic controller may keep track of trains speeding toward each other, or he may verbally control the flight path of airplanes, using radar to see their positions in the sky. A traffic controller, who may be a policeman or a flagman, may direct traffic around an accident scene, a road construction site, or a funeral cortege.

Railroad work brought about some unusual machinery, not all yet identified in the list of transport terms. A ?high-railer? for example, is a heavy duty truck with four steel rail wheels that can be lifted to allow highway travel, or lowered to allow the truck to travel on railroad tracks. A high rail, however, is a main track.

Some more colorful transport terms are ?baby lifter??a brakeman; ?bastard tow??an ocean-going tow made up of dissimilar-sized barges; ?tire-kicker??a person looking at new or used cars who is unlikely to buy; and ?fender-bender??a minor traffic accident in a car. A ?crummy? is a bus used to transport workers to a job site.

The transportation has brought about the ?crash dummy,? an electronic figure that records the blows and potential injuries that might be received in an auto accident. There is a large field in the desert outside Phoenix, AZ, where new cars are deliberately driven into each other and into walls in order to determine how well their construction protects the ?passenger compartment? and grade them accordingly. Crash dummies are used to show how badly injured a passenger would be in an accident.