"Whenever Lawrence and his men ran out of supplies they would simply go over to the Turkish Railway which crossed the desert from Damascus to Medina and blow up a Turkish train or bridge. He playfully called it ‘planting tulips.’ During the campaign Lawrence and his associates blew up some 79 trains and bridges in all. General Allenby in one of his reports said that Lawrence had made train-wrecking the national sport of Arabia. Fate never played a stranger prank than when she transferred this youthful poet and scholar into the commander of an army, a creator of kings and princes, and into the world's greatest train-wrecker”
-Lowell Thomas
“With Lawrence in Arabia” (1919)
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