evidence: But after having been literally stalled in its tracks due to a savage civil war that led to abject neglect, the Sri Lankan Railways are these days on a comparative roll. After a nearly 25-year hiatus, the Queen of Jaffna is due to resume services, linking the once war-ravaged Tamil-dominated north with the rest of the country. It's also nearly a decade since a tsunami careered onto a tranquil Sri Lankan coastline, killing 50,000 people including passengers on a crowded train travelling on a line, which will feature on my own journey, directly beside the palm-fringed beaches of the south-west corner of the so-called tear-drop island. [...] Here, at 6.55am on December 26, 2004 the Queen of the Sea – so named because its route hugged the scenic south western coastline of Sri Lanka – departed Colombo on a routine journey to Galle. Aboard the packed train were as many as 1500 passengers. At 9.30am at the village of Peraliya, now literally erased from the map, the first of the tsunami waves from the earthquake that had earlier struck off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, swamped the Queen of the Sea. It was followed by a second massive watery tumult, fatally trapping passengers inside the overcrowded carriages and drowning those who managed to somehow extricate themselves. It's surely not just its shape that leads people to call this the teardrop isle.