055- The Lost Special

Fett up with the everyday grind. Tired out by the dull routine. Want to get away from it all? We offer you... escape! Escape! Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure.

You are speeding through the English countryside. the fast express train rocking beneath your feet. And you know that somewhere in the dark ahead of you, a band of men applauding the destruction of the train, are planning the moment of your death.

Today we escape to England at the turn of the century and the story of a complete train that vanished from the face of the earth. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle told it in his fascinating tale, The Lost Special.

Twenty years with Scotland Yard have brought me into contact with many weird and unusual events in human affairs. But none was strength and the occurrences which began on the afternoon of June 3rd, 1890, in the railway station at Liverpool.

On no case before had I ever felt myself so helpless, groping blindly as it were for an unseen adversary, not being certain of the nature of the crime, not even knowing in fact if it were a crime.

Suffice to say that along a short stretch of railway line in western England, I learned what is truly meant by terror of the unknown. At four o'clock of the afternoon in question, having completed a rather minor investigation which had brought me to Liverpool, I was sitting in the waiting room of the railway station reading

and waiting for the six o'clock train for London. entirely unaware at that moment of a rather ordinary conversation that was taking place in the office of Mr. James Bland, the station master of few yards away.