North Korea: Russian diplomats leave by hand-pushed trolley

Clifford Stoll's story about Andy Odell I always thought inspiring -

Andy Odell’s name is synonymous with non-radial oscillations in stars and protoplanets. While a grad student at the University of Wisconsin, he noticed the sorry state of the nation’s railroad system. Decades of neglect had left Wisconsin crisscrossed with abandoned train tracks. With a scruffy red beard, scruffy blue jeans, and scruffy black sneakers, Andy set out to capitalize on this situation.

Working late nights in the astronomy department’s workshop, he liberated an eight-foot sheet of plywood, four rubber wagon-wheels, a couple of four-and-a-half-foot axles, and a lawn-mower engine.

Andy built a go-cart for railroad tracks.

“You gotta make the tires out of rubber,” Andy explains. “Otherwise, they’ll conduct electricity and you’ll set off the lights along the way.”

Grinning like fools, Andy and his companion coasted into town around eleven on a Saturday night. Doing ten miles an hour, they got most of the way through town, past streets named Lucy, Minerva, Harriet, Ann, Alice, and Louisa. It was someplace around the last three streets that they looked up to notice a police car ambling alongside.

Silicon snake oil : second thoughts on the information highway by Stoll, Clifford https://archive.org/details/siliconsnakeoils0000stol_c3s4/pa...

That vehicle is more reasonably described as a handcar or draisine. And if no one will take you across the border, that seems like a fine, low-tech solution. Leaving North Korea by "hand-pushed trolley" makes me visualize a press gang walking behind the trolley and pushing it along.

They pushed them selves for 1Km.