The Thermonuclear Train Of TERROR!

Ah, Uppercase, How I Love Thee
Please note that your humble scribe only used a single exclamation mark, proof that I can be restrained when need be.
     Today's Intro, and title, come from a note I jotted down last night, to whit: "Horror Express".
     I don't think I was referring to that cheap and cheerful horror fillum of the same name - but with my mind you never know. Treacherous things, minds. 
     Here an aside.  Art?

The cat had left something behind ...

     The film "Horror Express" was made because the producers managed to get hold of a couple of train carriage sets from the immensely more lavish production of "Nicholas and Alexandra".  Having got the sets, they then created a film around them.  And there is a classic line which IMDB shamefully neglects to add; when Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are paired together to hunt down the body-hopping monster, another passenger queries that either of them might be the monster.
     "My dead chap, we're British!" counters Mister Cushing.  And that settles the matter.

A keen wargamer as well, actually

     Back to the Chemin De Fer of Fear!  
     We have been looking at ways this world might come to an end of late, and of course anything that increases the size of the world's nuclear arsenals is always a bit of a worry - though I take it that the Powers That Be have taken steps to ensure a General Jack D. Ripper scenario cannot occur in real life.

Powers Boothe.  Close enough
(A still from "By Dawn's Early Light, which is a thriller about - you guessed it - nuclear war)

     Art got something right for once!  Entirely by accident, and he can't take any credit, it's all my influence.
     Where were we?  Oh, that's right, trains.  If Ol' Don is keen on tearing up treaties and getting missile plants tooled up to run day and night again, then we might see the arrival in South Canada of the train-transported nuke.  Don't laugh, it was being tested as a concept back in the early Sixties, and the Sinisters had several deployed operationally before 2005.  Tsar Putin was boasting about having new ones created, until he saw the price tag.
     Anyway!  Back to South Canada.  There was an experimental train system used for a couple of years, under the title of "Peacekeeper", before the Cold War ended.  Art?

Playing the innocent, eh?

     The cost would have been about £10 billion for 25 trains, each toting 2 ICBMs.  The idea of having your Big Bang Bombs on a train is that they are surpassingly mobile and can easily be miles away from any incoming ICBM by the time it arrives.  Plus, they can hide in tunnels.
     Of course, such a scheme would never get off the ground here in the Allotment of Eden, since First Group would lose at least one train, have half the rest out of service because of <insert feeble excuse here> and would fire the others at Switzerland.  Or Swaziland, if that's still a thing.

A death-dealing Kargo of Kill!

     Time to see if it's possible for the motley to clean out a petrol tanker with a box of matches!

That was a mighty long intro.  Tomorrow I'll tell you more tales of thermonuclear terror-trains.

A Sinking Feeling
Did you realise that, alongside Atlantis and Lyonesse, another sunken continent was proposed to have existed in the Indian Ocean?  This was back in the 19th Century, where all sorts of lost continents and land bridges were proposed, to the extent that old Earth's continents would have been going up and down like express elevators if these theories were accurate.  Art?

Lemuria

     This hypothetical continent was proposed to explain about the lemurs, whose fossils were found in Madagascar and India, yet not Africa.  "How can this be?" puzzled the scientists.  "Aha!  Let us presuppose a conveniently-placed continent, which will solve everything."
     Except not.  We now know that continental drift has separated Madagascar from India, and that in the remote past both were part of the supercontinent Gondwanaland, wherein the lemur's ancestors roamed freely.

Sarcastic lemur is - ironic.

     Unfortunately for science, the woo-woo brigade got hold of the concept of Lemuria, and promptly adopted it as it was looking a bit unloved.  Now you too can wonder at the fantastically advanced Lemurian civilisation that had colour television, pepper vodka, automobiles and microwave ovens.*

Can also clean metal and fuel rockets

Finally -
Here's a test of how pop-culture savvy you are.  Earlier this week I posted a gallery of Judge Dredd characters, and dared you to identify them.  Today we cast our net a little wider, focussing on 2000AD in it's entirety.  Art?



     Anyone who guesses them all correctly will get a 24-hour pass out of the uranium mines when I take over.  Maybe a 48-hour pass if I'm feeling wildly generous.

*  But - did they ever put a man on the Moon, hmmm?