Tragedy in Wonderland

If Alice's Wonderland had a railroad, it would probably look like the "Far Twittering and Oysterperch," which for years has been chuffing through the pages of Punch. Under the management of its founder, Cartoonist Rowland Emett, its carriages are apt to be outhouses, its locomotives are overgrown with vines and their mechanism recalls Victorian bathroom fixtures. The Emett Railway is driven by elderly gentlemen with droopy mustaches, cobwebs in their ears, and a quiet contempt for the world about them. When the managers of the Festival of Britain were making plans for a London Pleasure Garden in which fun & games might sprout freely, they decided to transfer Emett's gentle caricature of the Machine Age into reality.

Up & down a 15-inch-gauge, 500-yard track scooted two not-too-reasonable facsimiles of the Emett trains (rechristened "Far Tottering and Oyster Creek"), past weird scenery erected along the line: flat-footed cows, crooked lampposts hung with lobster pots. One train had a candy-striped engine with a balloon-shaped boiler and an elegant, winged smokestack; the other had spidery wheels, a teapot boiler and potted pink geraniums on top. Midgets dressed up as policemen were hired the first week to direct the delighted crowds which flocked about Britain's own Toonerville Trolley.

One night last week, carrying a giggling load of passengers, one train was tootling along the single track when from the opposite direction the other approached at about 7 m.p.h. The clever device which controlled the trains--so that only one would be on the track at any time--had gone wrong, as if to demonstrate that Wonderland will not be governed by electrical switches. The trains crashed head on. In the wreck of the Far Tottering and Oyster Creek, one passenger was killed, 13 injured.

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