Derby Day at Epsom Downs. A multitude of people crowd to watch the races: dukes and dustmen, bishops and beggars, privileged ladies and prostitutes. The gamut of Victorian society and a hotbed for crime and crooks of all kinds. With the nation a-flutter in the run up to this national event, a disembodied head is discovered on a passenger train at Crewe; the first in a murky course of events that takes in murder, fraud and race-fixing. Detective Inspector...

When a rare silver coffeepot in the shape of a locomotive disappears from the train to Cardiff and a murder subsequently occurs, Inspector Colbert and his sergeant are called in to investigate

1860, Wimborne, Dorset. Rebecca Tullidge, miserably married to her callous husband, finds some escape through a love affair with another man. After putting her drunk husband to bed one Saturday night, she sneaks from their lodge to meet railway officer, John Bedloe. But much to her horror, she trips over her love's corpse on the railway tracks. The railway director calls Inspector Colbeck and Sergeant Lemming in from London to solve the hideous crime....

Following a string of successful performances, the Moscardi Circus is travelling by train to Newcastle for their next show. Yet a collision on the track with a couple of sleepers causes pandemonium: passengers thrown about and animals escaping into the night. When the body of a woman is discovered in nearby woodland, Inspector Colbeck is desperate to lend assistance, believing the two incidents might be connected. Who is the nameless woman and who...

"Halloween 1861. A special train with two carriages steams across the Lake District at night on its way to a place notorious for its record of supernatural incidents. Most of those on board have been fortified by alcohol so the mood is boisterous. Lighting inside the carriages is poor and without warning, the lamp goes out in the last compartment of the second carriage, plunging it into darkness. When the special reaches the end of its journey, the...

"When Robert Pomeroy, a young undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, finds a letter slipped under his door in the early hours of a rainy day, he flies into a panic. Hastily readying himself and dashing off a few lines for the porter to summon his friend Nicholas Thorpe, he hurries to the railway station. But he doesn't reach his destination alive. Inspector Colbeck and Sergeant Leeming are called upon to investigate this tragedy on the railway....