We went to sit at the front of the train
In seeking that extra thrill,
Marlene and me, and a guy called Kane
Who came from Mulberry Hill,
I hadn’t known him at all till then
He said that he knew Marlene,
And she had smirked when he said he knew,
She didn’t know that I’d seen.

Now this was one of those super trains
And we knew how fast it could go,
Over two hundred clicks, they said,
They certainly put on a show,
We sat in the very front window seat
Could see where the driver sat,
He wore a coat of orange and green,
A ridiculous pork pie hat.

Well, finally someone had signalled ‘Go’
And we rumbled off down the line,
To start, the engine was going slow
The driver had plenty of time,
But then, once out in the countryside
He must have been feeling the heat,
For it went so fast, down the track at last
It threw us back into the seat.

The trees and the meadows were flashing by,
No sooner there, they were gone
The little farms and the rustic barns
Like the gardens of Babylon,
Marlene was pale, I looked at her face
And Kane he was almost white,
‘I think we’d better move back,’ he said,
‘I’d like to get home tonight.’

I said I’d stay, when they both got up
And moved to the back of the car,
I didn’t want to give in to fright
We wouldn’t be travelling far,
But we missed a stop, went roaring through
And I looked where the driver sat,
He was slumped on over the speed controls
With his pork pie hat in his lap.

When the speedo said a hundred and ten
I first thought of throwing up,
It reached a hundred and ninety when
I did, in a paper cup,
The driver lay there, dead on the stick
As far as anyone knew,
We couldn’t get into his cab to check
And as for the train, it flew.

I joined the others, up at the back
And wrapped myself round a pole,
So when the rescuers got to me
At least they would find me whole.
The others stood, and clung to a rail
That passed up over their heads,
I said, ‘Get down, that metal will fail
And both of you end up dead.’

They wouldn’t budge in their deadly funk
Their eyes were popping and white,
We hit the buffers at General Trunk
And both took off in their flight.
Kane headfirst like an arrow flew,
Marlene went more like a ball,
So where Kane went through the windscreen first
The hole was narrow and small.

Marlene, there wasn’t a piece intact,
A rescuer known as Krips,
Said he had just been checking around
And found her child-bearing hips.
I got a terrible rupture where
The pole almost cut me in half,
Since then, I don’t ever travel by train
But stick to a horse and cart.

David Lewis Paget