Trash Landslide Blocks Soviet Railway Line

A landslide from a trash heap crashed down onto a rail line in the western Ukraine, burying the tracks under a giant layer of dirt as high as a 10-story building in some places, the Tass news agency said Thursday.

Tass said a 1,800-foot stretch of track on the Lvov-Uzhgorod line was covered after 17.5 million cubic feet of dirt slid off a refuse dump outside Kamenitsa station in the Transcarpathia region. Tass did not say when it occurred.

Because of the importance of the rail link between Lvov and Uzhgorod, which is on the Soviet border with Czechoslovakia, track was being laid around the giant mound of dirt, Tass said.