whistlestop tour

whistlestop tour (plural whistlestop tours)

1. A trip by train in which one visits many locations along the way, especially if those locations are not major cities.
   • 1987, Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, →ISBN:

     Gordon then accompanied the former Confederate president on what amounted to a whistlestop tour from Montgomery to Atlanta.

   • 2011, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, →ISBN:

     It now only remained for the world to decipher precisely what de Gaulle had meant in the various utterances of this his first whistlestop tour of Algeria, and how he was going to follow them up.

   • 2011, Michael O. Holt, Valdosta 1964, →ISBN:

     In October 1964, First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson embarked on a whistlestop tour of Southern cities to support her husband's presidential reelection bid.

   • 2013, Bill Richardson, Kevin Bleyer, How to Sweet-Talk a Shark:

     A short walk, and soon we were in the train station. Well, not an entire station, but a room with Kim Il-sung's private locomotive, pulled to a stop inside the Memorial Palace. It's parked there so visitors can have a peek inside the very train car that took the Great Leader as far as West Africa on a lifelong whistlestop tour of fellow authoritarian regimes.

2. (by analogy) An overview of a subject which includes a number of illustrative examples.
   • 2009, Susannah Bowen, Steve Carey, How to Save Your Life, →ISBN:

     This chapter is a whistlestop tour of basic marketing ideas.

   • 2014, Linda Hurcombe, Perishable Material Culture in Prehistory, →ISBN:

     This vast wealth of information has drawn on a wide range of examples and case studies from different parts of the world. Inevitably, this has been something of a whistlestop tour, but it has deliberately paused longer where the materials and technologies are less familiar.

   • 2017, Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World:

     First, let's sketch out that geographical unevenness with a whistlestop tour of the world in figures - excess mortality rates, to be precise..