"No, Not the Mind Probe!!?!"

Another one taken during my holidays in July this year. This one is basically testimony to my ability to be amazed by actually not-all-that-amazing things and to make up stories about things I'm unfamiliar with.

Apologies for the quality of the photos; they were taken through the windscreen of a car parked behind Carlisle Castle:



Yeah, so basically the railway lines run not a stone's throw from the back wall of the castle. We were just getting ready to get out of the car and go and have a look at said castle when this train started rumbling past. It drew my attention because it had about three or four locomotives all coupled together at the front end to pull it and a lot - a lot - of these big boxy weird-looking carriages of a sort I didn't recognise. I don't know how many exactly, I lost count at about twenty, but it was more than that. So naturally, faced with something I couldn't identify off the top of my head (and bear in mind I know next to nothing about modern day rail transport), I said to my stalwart companions, "do you reckon they're full of nuclear waste or something?" Once said, of course, this could not be unsaid and it naturally became our favoured Fox Mulder-esque explanation for the whole troubling incident. So we took photos. You know, for evidence.

So when I got back to somewhere that had internet access, I of course set out to make it my business to discover the true, shocking nature of the mysterious train cars. And now, here for the the first time, I can reveal the Awful Truth...


( The Truth - If You Can Handle It! )

So, er...mystery solved. You can stop laughing at me any time now.

Among my other many and varied interests, I am a sometime student of the weird and phantasmagorical. Which is to say, those Arthur C Clarke "world of the unexplained" type programmes and those Usborne books about monsters, UFO etc made a big impression on my primary-school-aged self back in the 80s. Unfortunately, in later life, I come to realise that it's all bunk, but entertaining bunk and that's the main thing.

Anyway, this tickled me greatly; it's a pretty extreme example of the kind of bonkers propaganda stories that came out of WW1; fodder for another retro-Torchwood story methinks, or maybe some truly deranged original fiction:

lippard.blogspot.com/2008/12/hound-of-mons.html

And your guess as to what "careful training in fiendishness" might consist of is as good as mine.