You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind,

a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.

That's the signpost up ahead. Your next stop, the Twilight Zone.

Tonight's episode. Tonight's episode of the Twilight Zone takes place after a heist. Now we don't see the heist, but we hear the characters talking about it.

Rod Sailing's novelisation of the story gives us a little bit more detail. It starts off like this.

The tracks of the Union Pacific were reptile twins snaking their way south of the Nevada

line into the vast torrid valleys of the Mojave Desert. And once a day when the crack streamliner city of St. Louis

thundered along these tracks past a needle-like volcanic crags, the distant, saw-toothed

desolate mountains, the Dead Sea of Ash and brittle Creosso brush, it was the intrusion of a strange

anachronism.

The screaming power of the diesel pushed aside the desert winds.

It shot past the white and arid wastes of the ancient land, as if afraid of being caught

by the jagged, crumbling spares of rock that surrounded the great quadrangular desert.

And once, just once, the impossible happened.

The steel cord that tied the train to the earth was parted.

Too late the giant wheels sent up protesting sparks and agonizing metal shrieks, trying to stop, that which could not be stopped, 50 tons of engine and train moving at 90 miles an hour.

It thundered off the broken tracks and smashed against a sloping sand dune with an explosive roar that shattered, that still desert,

with earth-shaking reverberation. Cars followed the engine off the tracks like nightmares

piling atop nightmares until the carnage had spent itself. The city of St. Louis was a dying

metal beast, with 15 broken vertebrae stretched across the desert floor.

So armed with a little bit more background detail, let's take a look at tonight's episode of the Twilight Zone, the Rip Van Winkle Caper.

Introducing four experts in the questionable art of crime.

...