It turns out when you rode the train in Fallout 3 you were wearing it on your head.

The image, below, popped up online yesterday as part of a discussion about how the vehicles in post-apocalyptic games Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas actually work.

In Fallout 3's Broken Steel add-on, you repair then ride a Presidential Metro train. The bizarre image shows a character wearing a train carriage as a hat, suggesting when you ride the Metro in the game, you're inside a train car an NPC is wearing. That NPC, it suggested, would be running around underneath the tracks.

But this isn't what's happening. PC Gamer dug into Fallout 3's editor and discovered the Metro carriage in question is an item called "DLC03MetroCarArmor" (Broken Steel was Fallout 3's third downloadable add-on). And it's an arm piece, not a hat.

When you ride the Metro in Broken Steel, your character wears the "DLC03MetroCarArmor" item. Then the game activates a package called "DLC03MetroCameraPackage", which plays an animation that makes it look like you're inside the train as it travels on rails.

So, the truth is, in Fallout 3, you are the train. It's a pretty cool game developer trick!

Check out Fallout 3's Presidential Metro cutscene in the video below (skip to the 7.55 mark).