From Geoffrey Boothroyd
With regard to “clusters of millipedes” halting an express train in Tokyo
(Feedback, 19 August),
I have a book from my youth called Creepy
Crawlies by Paul Temple (Puffin Books, 1988) which had a chapter on keeping
centipedes and millipedes. In its “Did you know” section, it remarked:
“Millipedes (remember that the biggest are about 20 centimetres or 8 inches
long) have stopped trains. A migrating group can swarm over railway lines, and
when a train runs over them the millions of crushed bodies cause the wheels to
slip. Since the wheels can’t grip the track, the train just stops.” And also:
“65 million millipedes were seen in one migrating group in 1918 in the state of
West Virginia . . . They were probably moving to a new area to find food but
nobody knows exactly why they migrate.”
Swansea
