KUALA LAMPUR (TheSkunk.org) – A light rail Metro train heading from Kelana Jaya to Gombak on Tuesday never reached its destination, according to Malaysian Ministry of Transportation spokesperson Hasan Jamaluddin Seng Kuan. The train, #KJ202, which was supposed to arrive at the terminus platform at 12:34 pm local time, was last heard from as it disembarked from the Masjid Jamek station twenty minutes earlier.
Its current whereabouts are unknown.
According to Seng Kuan, the conductor of the train radioed the dispatcher at 12:13 pm with a message that everything was “Hun-kee Do-ree,” a routine expression among light railway operators in Asia to indicate that all transportation systems are running without complications.
Prime Minister Najib Razak told the families of the missing railway passengers the government of Malaysia will utilize “all the resources we have to locate Metro KJ202 — just as long as it doesn’t cost too much.”
“Our international counterparts have offered assistance,” said Razak, “and we have asked the Americans to send in submarines, robots and three-dozen cases of Weathertech floormats.”
Explanations for the mysterious disappearance have been flooding chat rooms on the Internet, with theories ranging from terrorist hijackings to UFO abductions. On Twitter, #WheresTheTrain has been trending in the top ten all day. “We should check the jungles of Pakistan,” read one tweet. “There are thousands of places on Earth where terrorists could hide a 29 kilometer long commuter train,” read another.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott promised to do everything in his power to help with the search and rescue efforts. “Whatever equipment and personnel we can provide will be readily available to assist our Malaysian friends,” he said. “They just have to come pick it up, because we really don’t have any way of getting it over there.”
Abbott’s own transportation experts believe the train could be anywhere in the Eastern Hemisphere. “It will be next to impossible to narrow the search area with the limited information we now have,” lamented Donald Greenstem, Vice Chairman of the Australian Model Railroad Association. “The satellite images could take months to comb through.”
“If there were only some way we could get an idea of the path it was travelling at the time of its disappearance,” he added. “That would be a big help.”
Where’s the dang path?!