What happens
Inspector Collins of Scotland Yard investigates the disappearance of a special train carrying an engineer, a crew and two passengers between two stations near Liverpool in 1890. The passengers were a hurried Latin American traveller, Mr. Carrotal, and his guard, Gomez. Station master James Bland and his staff check the rails and the spur lines, and Collins works through the impossible possibilities. The episode is part of the radio series Escape, first broadcast on 1949-02-12, and is adapted from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's story The Lost Special. Lead actors are not named in the transcript.
Liverpool and the railway line between Liverpool, Manchester and Barton Moss in western England, 1890
Characters: Inspector Collins, James Bland, Mr. Carrotal, Gomez, Mr. Hood, Mr. Dalton, John Slater, Mr. Moore
Listen for: The inspector's reasoning about which explanations are impossible and which are merely improbable, as the spur lines are checked one by one.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.