Trouble on the Tracks

It is sometime in the 1920s when, during one of the worst winters in memory, an overnight sleeper train meets with a terrible accident. Amid a fierce gale, the express jumps the tracks and plunges into the icy waters beside the railroad. A dozen bodies have been recovered from the wreckage, but 20 people are still missing, including the engine-driver and stoker. Survivors and bodies have been taken by road to the nearest town. The police and railroad company engineers are looking into the causes of the accident.

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Possibilities

1 Degenerate Serpent People from a decaying colony in caves near the railway have struck a blow against the hated humans who, with their noisy, polluting machines, have usurped the rightful position of the reptilians as masters of the Earth. The Serpent People have tunnelled beneath the rail-tracks to cause the accident. They are only interested in killing humans: the missing people are dead.

2 Deep Ones from an undersea colony off the coast are experiencing breeding problems. Fertility rates are dropping, and almost every child born to the colony for the last hundred years has been male, so the male/female ratio has become grossly unbalanced.

Desperate to find females to breed with, but aware that raiding another Deep One settlement or attacking a local community would cause more problems than they could deal with, the Deep Ones launched an assault on the overnight sleeper to steal human brides.

Of the people missing from the train, 16 are female. Of the bodies recovered, ten are male. Most of the missing females have been taken to the hybrid settlement.

3 One of the passengers on the train has interfered once too often in the affairs of a particular cult. Enraged by the investigator’s troublemaking, the cultists have summoned a hunting horror to wreak vengeance on the meddler. The Hunting Horror attacks while the investigator is travelling on the train, terrorising the engine crew and causing the driver to take a bend at an unsafe speed.

©  Tony Hickie