1

The Stories

BUCKINGHAMSHIRE

High Wycombe

The first railway at High Wycombe was the Wycombe Railway, opened in 1854 from Maidenhead via Bourne End. It was leased to the Great Western Railway (GWR) and extended in 1862 through Princes Risborough to Thame, and later to Oxford. Subsequent lines gave High Wycombe direct services to Banbury, Leamington and Birmingham on the GWR, to Rugby and points north via Ashendon Junction and Brackley, by courtesy of the Great Central Railway, and to Paddington via Beaconsfield over the line of the Great Western & Great Central Joint. The line through High Wycombe is still operational.

One night a railwayman had been having a drink or two with friends in a pub close to High Wycombe Station. Tearing himself away from the convivial company, he made for the station to catch a late train home to Beaconsfield. There were few people about at this time of the night, the station was quiet and the platform for his train was completely deserted when he got there. He had a few minutes to spare before the train was due. He then heard footsteps crunching along the ballast at track level. They approached and passed close by with no one visible to make the crunching! He heard the distinctive sound retreating into the distance, only to stop abruptly when some other passengers arrived on the platform. His train ran in and soon deposited him at Beaconsfield. He was not drunk nor was he given to flights of imagination but it was a puzzled and confused man who made his way home that night.

He often used High Wycombe Station and he knew several of the staff there. He hadn’t been at all frightened by the strange invisible footsteps, but he couldn’t get the experience out of his mind. He had little time for notions about ghosts and spooks and prided himself on being rational and level-headed. The next time he was there he mentioned what he had heard to one of the ticket collectors. This man didn’t bat an eyelid. He and several other members of staff had heard the same disembodied footsteps. From time to time when the station was quiet, footsteps marched up to a particular door, and when the railway worker inside opened it, there was no one there. The men who had these experiences all thought a ghost was responsible but, oddly, none of them had ever felt frightened. After this, our man from Beaconsfield was never quite so adamant that ghosts were all products of the fevered imagination.

CAMBRIDGESHIRE

Conington

Conington is a small village, little more than a hamlet, and is close to the Great North Road about seven miles south of Peterborough. The very fine parish church of All Saints is some distance from the village and it possesses an especially magnificent west tower from about 1500 which can be seen, embowered in trees to the west, by travellers on the East Coast Main Line. Conington Crossing is something over a mile east of the church. It has the reputation of being haunted.

In March 1948 a light engine on the main line hit a lorry carrying German prisoners-of-war on this crossing. They were being taken to work on local fenland farms, and the accident which led to six of them dying happened at seven in the morning, on one of those days of dense fog that used to be so characteristic of this area. Later in 1948 an eminent citizen of Peterborough had been shooting in the fens with a companion, and he was killed instantly when his large and distinctive black Chrysler car was hit by an express train as it made its way over the crossing. On this occasion the visibility was excellent.

These two accidents followed any number of hair-raising narrow escapes over the previous decades, and a few fatalities. The road over the crossing was a very minor one which led to little more than a handful of farms, and traffic was very light. However, there was at that time no signal box to control the crossing and users had to open and close the gates as well as to get themselves across, exercising extreme vigilance because of the frequency and the speed of trains at this point. Unfortunately, users of the crossing were not always as careful as they needed to be and they sometimes took undue risks or forgot to close the gates after them. Footplate men on the locomotives that worked this stretch of line hated the place which had gained the reputation of being a serious danger spot. Pressure developed and eventually British Railways built a signal box to control the crossing.

Conington Crossing is remote, quiet and lonely. A shift at the new box, especially the shift between ten at night and six the next morning, was no sinecure. Trains were frequent, although people or vehicles wishing to cross the line were few. What made working the box such a challenge were the strange occurrences recorded by the signalmen. It didn’t help that bitter winds howled across the fens, ‘straight from Siberia’, as they say in those parts, and they made the gates and other items of equipment rattle in a disturbing way. Several signalmen reported the appearance of a large black limousine, clearly waiting to cross the line. When they went to open the gates, however, the car vanished. This weird and irritating event happened several times. The car did not restrict its appearance just to the hours of darkness; when it turned up during the day it still waited for the gates to be opened, but disappeared as soon as the signalmen went to do so. All were agreed that this was the black Chrysler which, with its occupant, had returned to the scene of the fatality. This spectral car was unnerving enough in its own right, but the local word was that the crossing was also haunted by the ghosts of the German prisoners-of-war. Some signalmen refused to work the box, especially on the night shift.

Conington Crossing is still there with or without its ghouls and spectres but the signal box was closed and demolished in conjunction with the establishment of a high-tech signalling centre at Peterborough in the 1970s. To this day, few people who know the area will volunteer to hang around at Conington Crossing, especially after dark.

Peterborough

In 1945 a married couple who lived in North London decided to visit relatives who lived in Newcastle-on-Tyne. The war was over and people just wanted things to get back to normal as quickly as possible. Many of the restrictions on travelling had been lifted, but the railway system was sorely run-down. Maintenance work had taken a back seat in the attempt simply to keep the vastly increased number of trains moving that were needed to support the war effort. Part of getting back to normal was to visit faraway relations, something that had been more-or-less impossible for the duration of the war.

The couple were not fond of train travel and so were looking forward somewhat glumly to the journey, expecting the train to be dirty, late and overcrowded. This had inevitably become almost the norm over the previous few years. They were therefore pleasantly surprised when they got to King’s Cross not only to find their train with ease but to get seats in an otherwise unoccupied compartment. The train itself seemed reasonably clean, even to their somewhat jaundiced eyes. Not for them the pleasures of watching the moving scene as the train, headed by a Gresley A3 4–6–2, steamed northwards. They had bought a pile of newspapers at W.H. Smith to relieve the tedium of the journey.

Serried ranks of tall brickyard chimneys and a sulphurous smell indicated that the train was approaching Peterborough, its first booked stop. The train drew to a halt, there was some activity on the platform and passengers were walking up and down the side corridor. The compartment door slid open and an elderly lady entered carrying a sizeable wicker basket. She smiled at the couple and then sat down without saying a word. Her appearance had quite an effect on both husband and wife, although it was the wife who took in the details of the newcomer’s appearance most keenly. The newcomer was dressed from head to toe in black. Her clothes were elegant and clearly of the highest quality. However, she was a walking anachronism! Every inch of her gave the impression of a prosperous Victorian lady of fashion. She looked very composed as she sat in the opposite corner, her face partly obscured by the brim of her sumptuous hat.

Grantham was the next stop and the train halted long enough for locomotives to be changed. The man decided he had time to get some tea from the refreshment room and he bought three cups – it was a kind thought that perhaps their new travelling companion might appreciate something to drink. He returned to the compartment and offered her one of the cups, which she took with a smile but, perhaps strangely, without saying anything.

Further calls were made at Doncaster, York and Darlington, but no one disturbed the silence in the compartment. Husband and wife continued to read the papers or to doze fitfully. The woman sat motionless, eyes closed. Every so often the man would peek at her. He didn’t know exactly what it was but there was definitely something odd about her – odd, that is, apart from the outdated fashion she sported. As the magnificent cathedral at Durham came into view, standing with the castle as its companion on the great rocky bluff above the River Wear, it was clear that this was where the woman was intending to leave the train. The man, ever gentlemanly, slid back the door for her and gestured that he would carry her basket. She smiled graciously, but without speaking, and stepped down onto the platform. The basket was strangely light, given its size. He handed it to her whereupon she spoke for the first time. ‘I wish you many happy years,’ she said. Having uttered these slightly enigmatic words, she vanished into thin air! Who was the lady in black who got on the train at Peterborough, sat in the compartment of the East Coast Main Line train and alighted at Durham that day in 1945?

Soham

On 2 June 1944, the 00.15 special freight train from Whitemoor to Earls Colne was travelling along the line from Ely to Fordham, approaching the small fenland town of Soham at around 03.00 a.m. Driver Gimbert, aboard a W.D. 2-8-0, looked back and noticed that the wagon behind the tender was on fire. The train’s payload consisted of bombs! Thinking quickly, but not panicking, Gimbert slowed the train and instructed fireman Nightfall to climb down and uncouple the wagon that was alight. This he did, and when he regained the footplate, locomotive and blazing wagon were moved forward. The Soham signalman was standing on the platform and Gimbert told him that he intended to haul the wagon into a cutting just ahead where the force of any detonation, if one happened, would be at least slightly reduced. No sooner had he informed the signalman to this effect than an enormous explosion occurred. The wagon was reduced to matchwood, the locomotive severely damaged as it was blown off the rails, Fireman Nightfall was killed instantly, the signalman received injuries from which he died shortly afterwards and the 18-stone Gimbert was propelled through the air for a distance of 200 yards, sustaining serious but not life-threatening injuries.

Soham Station. This neat little station disappeared in the explosion.

There is no question that had Gimbert and Nightfall not taken the action they did, the entire train might have blown up and Soham would have been obliterated. As it was, almost every window in the town was broken and nearly every house received some damage. For their heroism Gimbert and Nightfall received well-deserved George Crosses, that for Nightfall unfortunately being posthumous. Their valour was recognised decades later when each of the men had a Class 47 diesel locomotive named after him.

It has been claimed that part of this drama is re-enacted in ghost form annually on the anniversary of the Soham Explosion. A steam locomotive hauling a freight train arrives at Soham from the Ely direction and is then detached. The apparition ends by simply fading away. Fortunately the explosion is not re-enacted. The line through Soham is still operational, although the station closed many years ago.

Yarwell Tunnel

The attractive stone-built village of Yarwell is in Northamptonshire, but Yarwell Railway Tunnel is in Cambridgeshire. The tunnel was on a long branch line to Peterborough from Blisworth, on what became known as the West Coast Main Line. This cross-country route served Northampton, Wellingborough, Thrapston and Oundle. The line was built by the London & Birmingham Railway and opened to passenger traffic in June 1845 and goods traffic in December of that year. This was unusual. Usually lines opened for goods traffic before receiving official approval to run passenger trains.

The tunnel is over 600 yards long and provided a variety of problems during its construction. Conditions on the railway construction sites would have driven today’s health and safety officials apoplectic. Deaths occurred among the navvies and labourers employed on the works. Some may have resulted from drunken brawls out of working hours. It was by no means unknown, however, for the navvies to work while inebriated. They did the hardest and most skilled work, and it was part of their laddish culture to take risks and cut corners. Doing so when drunk, of course, only made the dangers worse.

Whether it was the ghosts of the navvies making their presence felt we will never know, but men involved in maintenance work in the tunnel over the years told stories of the strange noises they heard. These included what sounded like fights, cries of pain, groans and various unidentifiable sounds. They made the tunnel an unpleasant place in which to be alone, although fortunately they usually did their work in small gangs. Also inexplicable was the disappearance of tools and pieces of equipment that would have been of little use to anyone else. A new piece of track laid on one particular day was found the following day having apparently been tampered with overnight. Many of the wooden keys strengthening the joint between the rails and the iron chairs spiked to the sleepers had been removed. This would have made the track unstable and could have led to an accident.

When work was being carried out on the track in the tunnel, it was customary to post lookouts at both entrances to give warning of an approaching train. On one occasion a gang was busy in the tunnel when a freight train rushed in, despite the fact that no warning had been given. Fortunately there were no injuries, but the men were somewhat shaken by the experience and they rather indignantly wanted to know why the lookout apparently hadn’t been doing his job properly. They found him lying by the side of the track, uninjured but unconscious. When he came round he told the others that he had received a stunning blow on the head which knocked him out. This was puzzling because a doctor called to the scene could see no evidence of a blow. Equally puzzling was the fact that the lookout’s equipment was also missing.

Wansford Station is not far from the eastern end of the tunnel. A past stationmaster used to carry out his duties almost always accompanied by his cat, Snowy. One early evening Snowy very unusually couldn’t be found when it was time for his dinner. Having waited for an hour or so, the stationmaster decided to have a look at all the places where he knew that the cat liked to go. One of these was the tunnel, and the stationmaster entered, calling out Snowy’s name. The man was near retirement and had become somewhat deaf, and unfortunately he was struck down by a train and killed. Snowy never reappeared. Since the tragedy, a cat answering Snowy’s description has been seen on occasions mewing pathetically at the entrance to the tunnel of ill-repute. Or is it the ghost of Snowy?

Chester Station looking north. Nearby on the left stood a lead works. An employee there was killed on the railway and his ghost returned to stalk the works until they were demolished and houses built on the site.

Passenger services through the tunnel on the Northampton to Peterborough route ceased on 2 May 1964 and those from Rugby to Peterborough finished in June 1966. Ironstone trains to Nassington ceased from December 1970 and vestigial freight services as far as Oundle on the Northampton line ended in 1972. However, all was not lost; the eastern end of the line from Peterborough eventually became the Nene Valley Railway, a heritage line unusual in that its loading gauge allows it to operate continental rolling stock. Trains began to run through the tunnel on a regular basis again in 1984.

CORNWALL

Bodmin Road

The landowners around Bodmin and the citizens of that town did not exactly welcome the proposal that their town should be an early addition to the burgeoning railway network. The first schemes therefore came to naught, and it was not until 1874 that the Cornwall and West Cornwall railway companies proposed a branch from Bodmin Road on the main line from Plymouth to the west of Cornwall. When they discovered that the route proposed would require a lengthy and expensive tunnel they lost interest. However, when the London & South Western Railway Co. declared that it had Bodmin in its sights, the GWR – which had by now absorbed the two earlier companies – suddenly found that it cared so much for the welfare of Bodmin that it proposed to build a line to the town as soon as possible. It obtained parliamentary approval for the line from Bodmin Road on a different alignment from that originally suggested. The first sod was cut on 26 April 1884, and the line opened in 1887.

The Great Western’s station at Bodmin was a fairly simple affair of the sort beloved by railway modellers. It and the rest of the branch led a quiet and unexceptional life, although an accident occurred close to Bodmin Road Station in 1903. A platelayer called Bricknell was in charge of two small trolleys loaded with old sleepers. They got out of control on a slight down gradient because a sudden heavy shower meant that the brakesticks he and his colleagues were using became completely ineffective. The trolleys collided and Bricknell was crushed to death. The coroner at the inquest made some acerbic comments about the GWR’s safety arrangements, or, rather, the lack of them.

It was not long before the point at which the accident occurred gained the reputation of being haunted by a figure, described as being ghostly and ragged. It was both seen and heard by gangers walking the line during daylight hours and at dusk. It emitted ear-piercing screams of pain. Few who had this experience doubted that it was the ghost of the unfortunate Bricknell.

Bodmin Road in the GWR days. Note the curious arrangement to get water from the tank to supply locomotives at the platform-end.

St Keyne

The Liskeard & Caradon Railway opened in 1844 from Moorswater to South Caradon, a line designed to tap into the rich copper deposits and the resources of granite in the Caradon area of south Cornwall. At Moorswater the loads were transhipped into boats on the Liskeard & Looe Union Canal which conveyed the material to ships at the harbour at Looe. As the amount of minerals and stone being transported built up, the canal company decided that a railway line linked to the Liskeard & Caradon would save one lot of transhipment, and the resulting railway opened in 1860. In 1879 passengers began to be conveyed from Moorswater to Looe. In 1901 a steeply graded and sharply curved connection was put in which allowed trains from Looe to serve Liskeard Station on the Plymouth to Penzance main line.

The branch from Liskeard to Looe is miraculously still open for passengers, and on Mondays to Fridays enjoys a service of nine trains in each direction with one less on a Saturday. The line passes very near St Keyne’s Well. This, in its delightful setting, is the source of several legends, but the main one, perhaps obviously, refers to St Keyne herself. She is supposed to have been one of twenty-six children fathered by the fifth-century Welsh King Brechan. Obviously a busy man, Brechan nevertheless must have found time to bring his offspring up well because no fewer than fifteen of them became saints, including, of course, Keverne herself. She was beautiful and a woman of the utmost probity who went round righting wrongs and performing miracles until the time came for her to retire. She chose a spot by the well and planted four trees there: a willow, an oak, an elm and an ash. Later, as she was dying, she blessed the well in verse as follows:

The quality that man or wife,

Whose chance or choice attains,

First of this sacred stream to drink,

Thereby the mastery gains.

Apparently the well became famous, at least in Cornwall, and many newly married couples would head for the well when the nuptials had ended, each hoping that by being the first to quaff a mouthful of its limpid waters, they would establish who wore the trousers in the marriage.

The poet Robert Southey (1774–1843) visited St Keyne’s Well and felt impelled to mark the occasion and the legend in verse. Part of it goes like this, his poetic comment being that of someone worldly-wise: 

I hasten’d as soon as the wedding was done,

And left my wife in the porch;

But I’ faith she had been wiser than me,

For she took a bottle to church.

A neat but little-used halt. Its full name is St Keyne Wishing Well Halt, and it is a request stop on the Liskeard to Looe line. It all looks very tranquil by day, but ghost hunters have registered high levels of unexplained activity during the hours of darkness.

The custom certainly continued at least up to the twentieth century, and the story goes that one pair of newly-weds were on a Liskeard to Looe train heading to St Keyne. The young bride was so eager to get the upper-hand over the groom that she opened the carriage door before the train stopped, fell onto the line and broke her neck, dying instantly. This tragedy is thought by some to have imbued the halt and its surroundings with a mass of paranormal energy. Consequently, psychic investigators and ghost hunters have made many visits, usually at dead of night, and gathered much fascinating data. A young woman in a white bridal outfit is said to haunt the area around the well and the railway halt.

COUNTY DURHAM

Darlington, North Road Station

The Stockton & Darlington Railway was the first railway authorised by Parliament for the conveyance of goods and passenger traffic hauled by steam traction. This makes it of great historical importance despite the fact that few facilities were provided for passengers in its early years and that horses provided much of the traction. The line opened in 1825.

The S&D’s first passenger station in Darlington was situated close to the present North Road Station which opened in 1842. Back in the 1850s this station witnessed a striking manifestation of the paranormal. A watchman used to patrol the station and its surroundings, which included the nearby goods depot. This particular night was a cold one and, having done a patrol, the man went to a room in the cellar of the station for a drink and some snap. No sooner was he sitting down than he was aware that he had company. Without having made any noise in entering, a stranger and a black retriever dog were eying him up. They were uninvited, they were trespassing and there was something odd, even eerie, about their appearance. Not bothering to ask questions, the watchman jumped up, hoping that by doing so he might persuade the unwelcome duo to leave. When they didn’t he aimed a punch at the stranger. The watchman was a big and powerful man and the blow would have felled most mortals, but in this case it simply went through the figure in front of him and did so with such force that he injured his knuckles on the wall behind. By now he was aware that there was more to his visitors than met the eye, but his immediate thought that they were ghosts was modified somewhat when the stranger called out in pain and fell back as if the blow had landed on him fairly and squarely. As its master was going ‘Ow!’ the dog started to savage the watchman’s leg. However, the visitors must have decided that enough was enough and they went through a door into the adjacent coal cellar. His blood boiling at this interruption of his routine, the watchman followed them into the coal cellar, but they had disappeared, despite the door being the only means of entrance or exit. Probing a heap of coal to see if his adversaries were hiding seemed pretty pointless and so the watchman returned to the cellar and his unfinished tea. The whole bizarre episode had taken less than a minute. His leg was throbbing with pain but it was strange that when he rolled his trousers up to examine the damage the dog had done with its fangs, there wasn’t so much as a mark to be seen. What kind of a dog was it, he asked himself, which could cause such pain with no visible evidence?

The watchman, as the reader may have guessed, was no shrinking violet, and after work he was soon telling anyone who would listen about his nocturnal adventure. It was soon all over Darlington and, of course, there were some who thought he was just an attention-seeker. In the brouhaha brought about by his revelations, it was remembered that just a few years previously a railway clerk who was always accompanied at work by a black retriever had committed suicide in the same room where the watchman claimed to have encountered the apparitions. Some people accused him of having known this and used the information to get his moment in the limelight. Such taunts had no effect on the watchman, who never budged from his story.

Trains still call at North Road on their way to and from Darlington and Bishop Auckland. Most of what were the old station buildings are now occupied by the Darlington Railway Centre and Museum.

Darlington North Road. The train-shed in pre-grouping days.

CUMBRIA

Lindal Moor

Lindal was a wayside station on the main line of the small but enterprising Furness Railway from Carnforth to Barrow. This part of the line used to be in Lancashire. Large amounts of haematite iron ore were extracted in the district around Lindal, which consequently was riddled with underground workings. To service these workings, Lindal Ore Sidings were constructed, and it was at these sidings that one of railway history’s most bizarre happenings occurred on 22 September 1892.

A Furness Railway goods engine, Class D1, No.115, nicknamed a ‘Sharpie’ after its builders, Messrs Sharp Stewart, was standing light engine in the sidings when suddenly there was an enormous rumbling sound and a huge crater opened up. The driver, Postlethwaite, and Fireman Robinson leapt for their lives as their 50-ton locomotive disappeared into the gaping hole. A break-down gang was summoned from Barrow and they managed to extricate the tender. Removing the locomotive was going to be a more difficult matter and so they returned to Barrow for their heavy lifting gear. Imagine their surprise when, on their return, the locomotive was nowhere to be seen! It is thought to have ended up about 200ft down in the honeycomb of subterranean workings from which ore had been extracted and which had so unexpectedly collapsed. It is still there, and local legend says that it is running on the Hades & District Underground Railway! Over the years there has been talk of recovering it. Now there’s a challenge for railway preservationists! No.115 is effectively sealed in below ground and is quite probably largely unaffected by rust and corrosion, although it is likely to be bearing the scars from its fall.

Mining subsidence in the Lowfield Pit, which had workings beneath the railway, was blamed for this freakish occurrence and the Furness Railway Co., aware that other tracks in the area ran over similar subterranean workings, quickly had them packed with old railway sleepers in an attempt to prevent a similar incident in the future. It was not until the spring of 1893 that normal working was resumed at Lindal. Mining continued in the area and it was only half jokingly that the men used to quip about the new safety hazard, steam locomotives falling through the roof!

The line through Lindal opened in 1851 and the station closed in 1951, exactly a century later. The line remains operational but only a practised eye would be able to identify that at one time there were extensive sidings at this point. The route from Carnforth westwards along the northern side of Morecambe Bay and on viaducts across the estuaries of the Rivers Leven and Kent is a scenic delight even if the waters of Morecambe Bay have virtually ceased to lap the promenade at Grange-over-Sands.

Maryport

West Cumbria is a strange but fascinating part of the UK. It is out on a limb, not really being on the way to anywhere. People going to and from Scotland head up the West Coast Main Line or the M6, while others visiting the beauties of the Lake District do just that, and consider that Workington, Whitehaven and Maryport have little to offer. To travel by train from Lancaster via Barrow to Carlisle requires patience and fortitude. There are a few through trains. They take over three and a half hours – otherwise the passenger has to change at Barrow, taking even longer. This is a journey replete with visual interest but, especially when undertaken in one of those abominations known as a ‘Pacer’, a diesel multiple-unit, it would only be a dyed-in-the-wool railway enthusiast who would consider doing it a second time.

West Cumbria has been and remains isolated, but it has a proud record of mining, industrial and maritime activity. Coal was extracted from outcropping seams near Whitehaven as early as the thirteenth century, but major exploitation of the district’s coal and iron ore resources began in the eighteenth century and reached a peak in the following century. The area was exceptionally hard-hit in the years between the two world wars, and subsequently went into a recession from which it would not be unfair to say that it has never fully recovered. There is still much poverty in West Cumbria.

Few places in the area were harder hit than Maryport. In the inter-war years, unemployment in Maryport on occasions went as high as 80 per cent of the population of working age. In its heyday huge amounts of coal were exported through the docks, and many small ocean-going ships were built in the mouth of the River Ellen. Proposals to place the town on the expanding railway network were made as early as the 1830s. The first section of the Maryport & Carlisle Railway was opened in 1840 and completed throughout in 1845. Extensions were made under the auspices of other railway companies southwards down the coast through Workington, Whitehaven and Millom to Barrow.

In the 1930s a man, perhaps driven to distraction by Maryport’s economic woes, threw his baby onto the railway line whereupon it was promptly run over by a train, receiving appalling injuries from which it died a few hours later. The man was hanged for the crime, but on occasions for many years after this needless tragedy the screams of a newborn baby in extreme agony resounded around the spot, much to the horror of local residents. The line through Maryport is still operational.

Tebay

The trains that rush up and down the West Coast Main Line today pass the small settlement of Tebay in the twinkle of an eye. To most travellers the name ‘Tebay’ only recalls a service area on the M6. To railway enthusiasts, however, the place has much greater significance. It stands at the bottom of the climb to Shap which, with Beattock Bank north of Lockerbie in Scotland, represented the most formidable inclines facing northbound Anglo-Scottish steam trains. The climb itself involves four miles on a gradient of 1 in 75. So formidable are the Cumbrian Fells that when a line from London, Crewe and Preston to Glasgow was first mooted, it was believed that the steam engines of the time would not be powerful enough to make the climb. Instead for a while passengers could travel to an obscure place on the Fylde Peninsula which came to be known as Fleetwood after a major local landowner. There they embarked on steamers for Ardrossan in Scotland. However, steam technology moved very quickly and locomotives became powerful enough to ascend these heights, albeit with a sturdy shove from behind with a banking engine.

The line over Shap was built by the Lancaster & Carlisle Railway and formally opened late in 1846. Tebay was the place chosen for an engine shed to house the bankers, and a settlement of houses and associated social facilities was built for the railway employees. In that sense Tebay was a railway village every bit as much as Crewe was a railway town. The sight of a steam locomotive at full stretch pounding up Shap with the banking engine blasting away with brute force at the back was an awesome one, and also highly photogenic. Tebay and the lonely country abutting the climb to Shap became the haunt of generations of railway enthusiasts and some very fine photographs by the likes of Ivo Peters, Eric Treacy and Derek Cross survive to give an idea of the heroic physical efforts required by the crews of heavy trains climbing the bank. Steam working over Shap continued almost to the bitter end of regular steam power in the UK, and in the last few years enthusiasts from far and wide made the pilgrimage to enjoy and record a scene they knew was about to disappear.

Engine sheds were potentially very dangerous places and official entry was prohibited to all except those with written permission. However, notices not to trespass in such places did little to deter most railway enthusiasts who exercised great ingenuity in finding ways to ‘bunk’ sheds, this being slang for getting round them without a permit. We do not know whether the enthusiast concerned had permission, but he visited Tebay shed in 1967 to photograph some of the last generation of banking engines. These were Standard Class ‘4’ 4–6–0s, and a pretty rundown lot they were by this time. Tebay was only a small shed and just two locomotives were present when he visited. There didn’t seem to be anyone about, even if he had tried to ask for permission. Apart from the sizzle and gurgle of these two engines in light steam, the place was as silent as a grave. Anyway, he took what photographs he could and left, still rather puzzled by the apparent total lack of living beings in the shed. Imagine his surprise when his photographs came back from the processor and there in several of the pictures was a human figure staring at the camera with a slightly enigmatic expression. Even more enigmatic was that the figure was diaphanous and details of the locomotive in front of which he was standing could clearly be seen. He knew the figure had not been there when he took the photographs. Was it a ghost?

DERBYSHIRE

Chesterfield

The main line of the former Midland Railway leaving Chesterfield in a northerly direction shares the valley of the River Rother with the A61 trunk road and the Chesterfield Canal. Just to the north of Chesterfield is Tapton Junction where a freight-only line diverges to the east and avoids Sheffield passing via Staveley on its way to Rotherham. The main line heads for Sheffield via Dronfield and Dore.

On the hillside east of the railway at Tapton Junction stands Tapton House, now part of Chesterfield College of Further Education, about a mile from the town centre. It was to Tapton House that George Stephenson (1781–1848), often called ‘the Father of the Railways’, retired to spend the last ten years of his life. He had been born in humble circumstances but his was a life of rich achievement and he became a wealthy man with a host of business interests in railways, coal mines and ironworks, for example. He had never lost his broad Geordie accent nor had he cultivated much in the way of refined manners but he was on intimate terms with many of the ‘movers and shakers’ of his generation and there were frequently distinguished guests at his house. They tended to be hard-headed practical people like himself. He had little time for the idle fops of the aristocracy and gentry.

He remained very active during his years at Tapton and took great pleasure in the grounds of the house and in gardening. One of his less well-known endeavours was an attempt to cultivate a perfectly straight cucumber. While this was a worthy task in itself, and one to which he brought all his customary resource and determination, it was fated to be unsuccessful.

The final resting place of George Stephenson’s mortal remains is under the communion table in Trinity Church, close by. It seems, however, that his spirit could not abide to be away from his beloved Tapton House, and what is thought to be his ghost is seen from time to time moving from room to room as if in search of something. Not only seen but heard, because on occasions the ghost asks, ever so politely but in a Geordie accent you could cut with a knife, for a cup of tea.

The problem of the cucumber remains unresolved.

George Stephenson. The ‘Father of the Railways’ became rich and famous but never lost his thick north-eastern accent. 

A view looking north from Chesterfield  Station in the direction of Tapton.

Tunstead Farm

The line from Buxton northwards to Chapel-en-le-Frith, New Mills and Stockport was opened in 1863. It was initially operated by the Stockport, Disley & Whaley Bridge Railway and absorbed by the London & North Western Railway in 1866. The building of the line had not been easy. Any plan for public passenger-carrying railway lines had to be presented to Parliament in the form of a Bill to be considered by both Houses. If it was passed, it became what was known as a Local and Personal Act which, among other things, would equip the company concerned with rights for compulsory purchase. These would be exercised where landowners were unwilling to sell land or buildings, and one such place where this happened was Tunstead Farm. This remote place overlooked the railway between Chapel-en-le-Frith and Whaley Bridge, and it also overlooked Coomb Reservoir. The terrain is very hilly in this neighbourhood and the engineering works were correspondingly heavy. The route had been surveyed to cross part of the land associated with Tunstead Farm but so many problems were encountered with the embankments on this section of line and with bridges that collapsed and had to be rebuilt that eventually the company decided on a new route avoiding Tunstead Farm altogether. The engineers encountered far fewer problems on this adjacent new alignment and the work went ahead quickly. The company let it be known that geological conditions had forced the change of route. Local people knew otherwise.

Dickie o’ Tunstead is the name given to an ancient human skull which is kept at Tunstead Farm. Local legend says that it is the skull of one Ned Dixon, who was murdered by his cousin in the farmhouse. Any attempt to disturb it or particularly to move it out of the house will set in motion a series of accidents and even disasters which will only stop when the skull is restored or apparently reassured that no further disruption will take place. Nodding their heads sagely, the local wiseacres knew why the path of the line was altered. Dickie o’ Tunstead had made sure that it would.

Legends of skulls that take umbrage when the even tenor of their lives is disrupted can also be found at Burton Agnes Hall in East Yorkshire and Bettiscombe Manor in Dorset.

DORSET

Bincombe Tunnel

Weymouth was for a while almost the prototype of the fashionable as opposed to the popular English seaside resort. The town, which before the eighteenth century had largely been thought of as a decayed seaport, hit the headlines when in 1789 George III, no less, arrived, accompanied by the usual flock of medical advisers, bumptious officials and busybodies, court-followers, lounge lizards and toadies. The King was not a well man and he was in Weymouth to take advantage of the newly discovered therapeutic effects of sea-water. More specifically, he was there to bathe in the said water. After a few days breathing in the fresh sea air and viewing the sights, he allowed himself to be placed in a bathing machine and drawn out a short distance into the sea. He had squeezed himself into a costume which did little to hide the royal humps and bumps, and no sooner had he partially emerged to test the temperature of the water with his big toe than a band craftily hidden away in a nearby bathing machine struck up God save the King. They could scarcely have rendered the King’s first dip in the briny more public had they executed a 24-gun salute.

A local for Weymouth drifts out of the southern entrance to Bincombe Tunnel, the next stop being the quaintly named Upwey Wishing Well Halt. The locomotive is a 45XX 2-6-2T

These stirring events took place in 1789 and the King returned regularly to Weymouth until 1805, thereby guaranteeing the town pole position in the list of places that a certain class of person went in order to see and be seen. In the years that followed, however, other seaside resorts were busy copying Weymouth’s example. The railways played an important role in bringing the visitors on whom these places depended, and many of these resorts were much handier for London than far-distant Weymouth. By the 1840s Weymouth was well and truly in the doldrums and needed urgently to be connected to the country’s developing railway system. Southampton was joined to Dorchester naturally enough by the Southampton & Dorchester Railway in 1847. It was not until 1857, however, that its trains (having been taken over by the London & South Western Railway) could reach Weymouth by virtue of running powers over a line of the Great Western from Bristol, Bath, Frome and Yeovil. The GWR had reluctantly agreed to install mixed-gauge track, and the GWR and LSWR started their services to Weymouth on the same day. This at long last gave the town access to London, strangely enough right from the start, by means of two different routes.

Bincombe Tunnel stands on the section of line between Dorchester and Weymouth where it passes on a steep gradient under Ridgeway Hill. Its involvement in the world of the possibly supernatural was short-lived. In 1991 several train drivers reported that while passing through the tunnel they had hit what was described as a ‘substantial object’. This experience was made all the more unnerving because they thought it was a human body, either of someone who had been unaware of the approaching train or a person bent on committing suicide. This of course would be a traumatic experience for the unfortunate drivers. British Transport Police investigated each report but found absolutely nothing that could explain what the drivers had seen. As abruptly as the sensations in Bincombe Tunnel started, so they finished.

The line through Bincombe Tunnel is still operational.

GLOUCESTERSHIRE

Charfield

Charfield was a wayside station on the Birmingham to Bristol main line of the former Midland Railway, situated to the north-east of Bristol. Early on the morning of 13 October 1928 a Wolverhampton to Bristol goods train was being shunted back off the main line to clear the way for a fast overnight mail train from Leeds to Bristol. This train overran signals and crashed into the reversing goods train, part of which was still fouling the main line. A freight train from the Bristol direction was slowly passing at the time, and the mail train locomotive, coming off the rails, crashed into it. Three trains were therefore involved. Exactly at the point of impact there was a low over-bridge, and the carriages of the mail train piled up under this bridge and immediately caught fire. If anything can be said to be fortunate about the accident it was that the mail train was carrying few passengers. Fifteen died. The fire raged for twelve hours.

Among the dead were two children, a boy of about eleven and a girl perhaps two, maybe three, years younger. Although they were travelling together it seems that there was no adult accompanying them. This itself was rather odd because they were young to be travelling unaccompanied and especially at night. They had been observed by the fireman of the mail train chatting to the guard at Birmingham New Street. The fireman said that both children were well dressed and that the boy was wearing a school uniform. The guard was unable to add anything to this rather incomplete description of the children. He died in the fire. Those bodies recovered from the mail train were so badly burned that there was no chance of them being identified. They were buried in the local parish churchyard and the LMSR, successor to the Midland Railway, erected a memorial with the names of those buried close by. They obviously could not name the boy and girl. They are remembered on the memorial as ‘Two Unknown’.

Three mysteries are associated with the tragedy of these two children. The first is that the LMSR initially denied that the children had been on the train and argued that they must have been trespassing on the line at Charfield and were caught up in the accident, simply a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fireman of the mail train refuted this, stating that he saw them board the train at New Street. Why should the LMSR have lied?

Secondly there were some people who did not believe that the children or perhaps some of the other passengers were buried at Charfield at all but that their remains were spirited away by a military ambulance that was unaccountably present at the scene after the accident. No records exist as to why this vehicle was there. Thirdly, the death of two small children was obviously a tragedy. Why is it that no one ever came forward to say that they were the parents or guardians? Somebody presumably paid their fare at New Street and saw that they joined the right train. Someone else must have had the job of meeting them at their destination. They never came forward either. It was as if the children had never existed.

Memorial in the churchyard to the victims of the Charfield accident.

Some people claim that every year on the anniversary of the Charfield accident a woman in black is seen by the memorial in the churchyard. She looks grief-stricken and is generally reckoned to be the mother of the two unfortunate children.

The route between Birmingham and Bristol was an amalgam of different schemes and was open throughout in the early 1840s. Charfield closed for passengers along with other small intermediate stations on the line in 1965, but the line is still operational.

GREATER LONDON

Addiscombe

Addiscombe was the terminus of a service via London Bridge and New Cross from Cannon Street Station in the city. The line to Addiscombe itself was built by the South Eastern Railway and opened in 1864. Although, of course, the service was initially operated with steam trains, it became part of the Southern Railway’s expansive suburban network in the 1920s and a depot for electric multiple units was built where the old shed for steam locomotives used to be.

The depot for the electrics quickly gained a reputation for being haunted. A catalogue of phenomena was recorded. The old electric carriages were of course of the ‘slam-door’ variety. It was the job of the staff at Addiscombe Station to ensure that all the passengers had got off the last trains of the night before they went to the depot for cleaning and maintenance. The electric units should therefore have been empty except for their crews when they snaked their way into the depot. Some nights were punctuated by the sound of compartment doors slamming as if dozens of passenger had woken up from their snoozes, panicked when they realised where they were and leapt out of the trains, slamming the doors behind them in their urgency to get away. The sound of invisibly slamming doors being slammed by equally invisible belated travellers had an understandably disturbing effect on the night-shift staff.

When the trains came into the depot, the shoes picking up the current from the electric third rail would be isolated and, as a further precaution, the hand-brakes were screwed down. However, on many occasions members of staff relaxing over a mug of tea in the rest room would hear the sound of moving trains only to go outside and, as they expected, see that everything was just as it should be. The brake compressors which were isolated with all the rest of the electrical equipment would sometimes start making their rhythmic throbbing noise during the night even though no member of staff had been in the cabs of any of the units.

A mysterious figure was often seen in the environs of the depot sometimes apparently supervising the shunting of the units into the right positions for their departure in the morning. On occasions the same or another figure would be seen approaching a member of staff. This apparition had a menacing bearing but it used to vanish before any member of staff could recognise its facial features. Was this the force that also sometimes invisibly opened and closed the tight-fitting door to the rest room?

The depot had been the scene of a number of accidents leading to fatalities, and those who worked there reckoned that the ghost or ghosts were the spirits of these men whose lives were so tragically cut short.

The old Addiscombe Station and the depot itself no longer exist. They were closed when the Croydon Tramlink opened in 2000. The tram station currently called Addiscombe is on a different site. What happened to the ghosts?

GREATER MANCHESTER

Ashton Moss

There were three signal boxes at Ashton Moss. They were, respectively, Ashton Moss North Junction, Ashton Moss South Junction and OA&GB Junction. These initials stood for Oldham, Ashton & Guide Bridge Junction Railway, a line authorised in 1857 to join the oddly named station at Oldham Mumps to Ashton-under-Lyne and Guide Bridge. The railway network in this part of the eastern environs of Manchester was extremely complicated, the result of the wheeling and dealing, back-stabbing, outwitting and swindling which marked the activities of rival railway companies fighting for access to potentially lucrative traffic. This area associated especially with the cotton industry and coalmining seemed extremely promising. This manner of conducting business helps to explain the almost labyrinthine welter of lines that could once be found in many of Britain’s former manufacturing and mining areas.

One day in early 1975, the signalman at OA&GB Junction was a little surprised to hear footsteps climbing the external wooden staircase to his box. Visits from other railway workers were by no means uncommon, platelayers and suchlike dropping in for a cup of tea, a smoke and a chinwag, but this was Saturday afternoon and these men would mostly be enjoying time away from work, perhaps at a football match. The signalman saw the figure of a man he did not think he recognised reaching the top of the stairway. The doors of signal boxes rightly had a notice stating ‘no admission’. Concentration was a vital part of a signalman’s duty and management frowned on the idea of other railway workers using signal boxes for social purposes. Their presence, even unintentionally, might distract the attention of the ‘bobby’, as signalmen were called. They were rightly even more disapproving of members of the public visiting signal boxes without official permission. Working in a signal box could be lonely and on those occasions when there was little traffic around, it could most certainly be boring. No wonder that those signalmen who were of gregarious nature often welcomed a visit – even if it was from someone they didn’t know who wanted to get an idea of how signalmen conducted their business.

The signalman waited for a knock, and when that didn’t happen he walked across to the door and flung it open. There was no one there! The footsteps had been clearly audible coming up the steps; how could anyone have gone back down them in complete silence? Puzzled, the signalman descended and had a look around. He couldn’t go far in case his bells sounded and required a response, but as he climbed back up to his eyrie he was deeply perplexed. He had found nothing to suggest that there had been anyone in the vicinity, and yet he was convinced the footsteps had been real.

The next Saturday he was working the same shift when, just as dusk was falling, he heard a noise down at track level in front of the box. He slid back the windows and thought he saw someone down on the track some distance away. He got on the circuit phone to his colleague at the neighbouring Ashton Moss Junction who said that he could also see what he thought was someone on the line. They both informed control and decided to leave their respective boxes and see if they could apprehend the person – a foolhardy trespasser perhaps, or maybe someone looking to steal line-side equipment. They found nothing.

They were two sober, steady and conscientious men. They were convinced that someone had been down on the line, someone who apparently had the ability to disappear at will. Neither of the men had any time for the supernatural. We have to ask whether the figure was the ghost of a railwayman or someone else who had perhaps been killed on that stretch of line in some log-forgotten incident. The men never experienced the same phenomenon again.

The only line past the former Ashton OA&GB Junction which is still operational is that from Manchester to Stalybridge, Huddersfield and Leeds. It carries passenger trains on a frequency that could not have been conceived of back in the 1970s.

The uninspired access to Ashton-under-Lyne Station in the Greater Manchester suburbs.

Bradley Fold

Bradley Fold was an intermediate station on what became a through line owned by the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Co. This was an important route enabling trains from Merseyside to bypass Manchester from the north on their way to the West Riding of Yorkshire, and vice versa. The line also provided connections between a string of important intermediate towns such as Wigan, Bolton, Bury and Rochdale. The line through Bradley Fold opened to passenger and freight traffic in December 1848.

Bradley Fold was three miles west of Bury and had the semi-industrial, semirural atmosphere common to much of this part of what was then Lancashire. A small community was gathered around a nearby cotton mill. The station possessed a level crossing. It enjoyed a reasonably generous service of local stopping trains in addition to a few passing expresses and many heavily laden freight and mineral trains. The flow of these latter trains meant that the signal box was manned continuously for twenty-four hours each weekday. Duty on the night shift, ten in the evening to six the following morning, meant a lonely vigil, and was definitely not for those who were blessed with too much imagination.

To carry out the duties of a signalman effectively, concentration, alertness, scrupulous attention to the rules, a tidy mind and a systematic approach were absolute necessities. These qualities were displayed in plenty by a man who joined the railway in the 1950s after service in the Royal Navy. After training, he enjoyed his work, although he realised that it involved a very considerable burden of responsibility. One momentary lapse of concentration could lead to an appalling catastrophe. The man was naturally conscientious and made a good impression on the equally conscientious man alongside of whom he worked while he was undergoing training. The two of them recognised kindred spirits and became firm friends.

The two men were frequently on alternate shifts and would often share a short overlapping period at the end and the beginning of their respective shifts when they would have a chat over a steaming mug of tea. Our ex-Navy man had taken to his duties as if tailor-made for them, but it wasn’t long before he began to notice a degree of unease in his friend’s demeanour. This culminated in his friend telling him that he could stand it no longer and was leaving the job at the first available opportunity. Concerned but unwilling to intrude on his friend’s private thoughts, he wondered whether his friend had had any brushes with authority or any unpleasant experiences while at work. It was not unknown for vandals to find the windows of lonely signal boxes a tempting target even when they were manned. There was also coal and various copper and electrical fittings which provided temptation to the light-fingered fraternity. A signalman in such a lonely box could easily feel vulnerable.

He was on duty one night and dealing with a succession of trains in the witching hours. All traffic movements had to be recorded in the signal box’s train register, and he was just about to make some entries when he heard the unmistakeable sound of footsteps crunching the ballast close to his box. He grabbed a torch, opened the door, descended to rail level and flashed the light hither and thither, but to no effect. There was no one there.

Even a fairly stolid man would have been disconcerted to hear disembodied footfalls so close by, and he spent the rest of the shift trying unsuccessfully to make some sense of what he had heard. He returned to the box for his turn of duty the next night wondering whether his imagination had been playing tricks. At the same time in the early hours of the next morning he again heard the footsteps. By now he was aroused and determined to make sure that anybody out there playing at silly buggers wouldn’t do it again in a hurry. He grabbed a heavy poker and his torch and rushed down the steps. Again, nothing. Feeling indignation more than fear, he climbed back into the box and settled down, there being a gap in the procession of passing trains. Within a few minutes he heard a strange whistling noise apparently coming from outside the back of the box. Once more he took up poker and torch and descended to the track, absolutely sure that someone was taking liberties. He searched the area thoroughly but again found nothing.

Nothing untoward happened for an hour, when he decided to get some fresh air. He opened the door and stood at the top of the steps. It was a beautiful still night, only the bark of a fox or an occasional distant motorbike disturbing the otherwise almost tangible and immense silence around him. Suddenly he felt a wave of fear flooding over him and became convinced that his every move was being watched by eyes all the more threatening because he had no idea where they were. As he stepped back into the box, had he caught sight of some kind of fleeting shadow up near the ceiling? He could not be sure, but he felt certain that he was not alone and that something invisible was scrutinising his every move. How pleased he was when his shift ended.

On the third night and at the same time he heard the footsteps once more. He was clearly a man of courage because although his nerves were by now becoming somewhat shredded, he once again took up his poker and torch and rushed down the stairs. The sound of footsteps faded away to be followed to his horror by an ear-piercing scream close by. He flashed his torch in the direction of the sound and saw to his horror what looked like a human body lying by the side of the track. As he went to investigate, wondering whether someone had been knocked down by a train, the thing on the ground simply faded away.

He had now decided that he too would now look for another job on the railway which did not involve night shifts in lonely signal boxes at spots where such unnerving things happened. He lost touch with his friend, but some years later he discovered that a man had been killed on the line close to his box. He also learned that other signalmen had had similar experiences on the night shift but understandably had chosen to keep their experiences to themselves for fear that their colleagues might ridicule them or that management might think they were not up to the job. Had his friend also had similar experiences?

Bradley Fold Station Signal box. A typical timber-built Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Co. wayside signal box.

The line through Bradley Fold lost its passenger services in 1970. Freight services followed shortly after.

Manchester Mayfield

This was Manchester’s ‘forgotten’ railway terminus. By the first decade of the twentieth century the six platforms of the London & North Western Railway Co.’s part of London Road Station were proving inadequate for handling the growing traffic, particularly the increase in the number of suburban trains when the Styal Line opened. The London Road site could not be expanded and so a decision was taken to build an ‘overspill’ station as close by as possible. This station, known as Manchester Mayfield, was opened in 1910. It was small, having only four platforms, and was joined to its ‘parent’, London Road, by a long and gloomy enclosed footbridge.

It was used on a regular basis by various short-haul suburban services and regular travellers may have resented the walk to get to Mayfield, but at least they knew the ropes. The station was also used as an ‘overspill’ for long-distance trains at particularly busy periods such as summer Saturdays. Many were the stories of woebegone passengers arriving with very little time to spare at London Road only to find to their bemusement or fury that their train was scheduled to leave immediately from the Mayfield platforms, which were best part of half a mile away! Then followed a heart-palpitating dash with their luggage along London Road’s platforms, up the steps, along the footbridge and down into Mayfield, with the odds being that the traveller would be just in time to see his train steaming away into the distance.

Occasional travellers may not even have been aware that Mayfield existed and, indeed, it spent its life thoroughly in the shadow of its mighty neighbour. A massive rebuilding of London Road Station took place in association with the electrification of the lines to Crewe and later Stoke, Stafford and London Euston. This eliminated the need for Mayfield’s extra capacity and it closed to passengers on 26 August 1960. The rebuilt London Road Station opened on 12 September 1960 and was renamed ‘Manchester Piccadilly’, although ‘London Road’ did actually give a much better idea of exactly where the station was located in the city.

Mayfield was never a very prepossessing station, and it did not help that it was hit by a German bomb during the Second World War. Those who worked there may either have welcomed it as a rest cure after the hurly-burly of London Road or Manchester’s other three big stations or resented the feeling that they had been shunted into a semi-forgotten backwater. Whether this was responsible we will never know, but one station worker hanged himself in a cabin full of electrical equipment, and a foreman allowed things to get so much on top of him that he also hanged himself, but did so in the gentlemen’s toilets. A porter on the night shift fell to his death down the shaft of the luggage lift.

These events may have hung like a pall over the place, and Mayfield got a reputation for being spooked. Footsteps were heard walking deserted platforms on many occasions in the hours of darkness. One rail worker on the night-shift was sitting in his cabin when slouching footsteps shuffled past. He opened the door to peek out. No one was there but a distinct chill could be felt on what was actually a very humid summer’s night. One man twice experienced footsteps dogging his own as he walked to the station entrance in the middle of the night, having just finished his shift. Although scared, on the second occasion he was near the main collection of switches for the station lights and he flicked on all those which had been turned off in the semi-darkened station. Nothing was there.

In 1970 Mayfield became a rail-served parcels depot, and continued in that role until 1986 since when it has been disused, although it provided an ideal base for a drug dealer’s activities in an episode of the excellent TV drama Prime Suspect. At the time of writing (autumn 2008) the shell of Mayfield is still there. Various proposals have been made for it to return to use as a passenger station, to become a coach station or be part of a comprehensive redevelopment of this underused quarter on the fringe of the city centre. The ghosts, meanwhile, can roam in peace.

Typical LNWR lower-quadrant signals guard the approach to and exit from Manchester Mayfield Station.

HAMPSHIRE

Hayling Island

Hayling Island is a low-lying island standing between Chichester Harbour in the east and Langstone Harbour in the west. It enjoyed quite a vogue as a minor resort before British holidaymakers took advantage of cheap air travel to those foreign parts where sunshine is more surely guaranteed. Sailing is possible, as is windsurfing, and some people regard Hayling Island as the place where the latter sport was invented. The island is joined to the mainland at Havant by a road bridge.

The Hayling Railway Co. opened a line across a timber viaduct from Havant in 1867 and the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway took over in 1872. The Langstone Viaduct was of comparatively light construction which placed severe restrictions on the locomotives that could work over it. The LBSCR’s tiny but powerful ‘Terrier’ tank engines proved absolutely ideal and came to monopolise the working, and will for ever be associated with the quaint little branch line. The line generated great affection and was known as ‘Hayling Billy’. Unfortunately it did not generate similarly great revenue.

The line closed in 1963 but for some years after there were reports that the neighbourhood of the old Hayling Island Station was haunted by the ghost of a railway guard who had worked on the line back in the 1930s and ’40s and presumably couldn’t bear to be parted from it even in death. Other people claimed that the ghost was none other than that of a former stationmaster at Hayling Island.

Swanwick

Swanwick is a station on the Fareham to Netley and Southampton line which is still operational. The section through Swanwick was opened in 1889 by the London & South Western Railway.

In 1971 a man standing on Swanwick Station late one night was watching his only fellow-passenger. It was a woman who looked distressed and confused. She was crying and kept repeating the words, ‘I can’t go back.’ The train arrived and he wanted to help her get on because it was the last train that night. However, the guard was getting impatient with both of them and so he had no option but to leave her behind. Her evident distress worried him and he decided to phone the police when he got off the train. He did this, telling them where she was and that he thought she was probably at risk – perhaps suicidal. Next day he was browsing through a local paper which contained a story about a woman who had been hit and killed by a train at Swanwick a couple of nights earlier. There was a photograph of the victim. It was the distressed woman he had seen only the night before.

View of the Swanwick Station buildings from the street. The station is served by trains running between Southampton and Portsmouth.

HERTFORDSHIRE

Hatfield

After legal and parliamentary wrangling of monumental proportions, in 1846 the Great Northern Railway obtained sanction to build a main line from London to the neighbourhood of Doncaster. Services began in 1850. Some were long-distance expresses, but shorter-distance trains which we would now probably call outer-suburban ran from London to Hatfield to a station which was on a slightly different site from the current one.

The paranormal experience at Hatfield definitely casts the ghost in a positive role as a benefactor. In the 1900s a non-stop passenger train was passing through the platforms at the old Hatfield Station. The driver was rather put out when what he described as ‘an insubstantial man’ apparently leapt onto the footplate despite the fact that the train was moving quite quickly. This apparition, who exuded an unpleasant chilliness, somehow made it clear to the driver that he must slow the train and stop at the next station going southwards, which was Potters Bar. On arrival there the driver, already shaking like a leaf, started shaking more violently, but with relief rather than fear because he saw ahead of his train a large obstacle on the line. If he had continued at his normal speed the train would have crashed into this obstacle and there might have been a frightful accident. Turning round to express his gratitude, he realised that the apparition had vanished. What is to be made of this?

ISLE OF WIGHT

Newport

The Isle of Wight has often been described as a microcosm of southern England, although it is only twenty miles east and west by thirteen miles north and south. Its entire route mileage is a mere forty-five miles, and yet the lines involved had originally been projected by no fewer than six separate companies. The first line to be opened on the island was the Cowes & Newport in 1862. If anywhere was the hub of the railways on the Isle then it would have to be Newport. From there lines radiated north, south, east and west.

Since the lines closed, there have been many reports of strange phenomena around the site of the former railway installations at Newport. At the site of the old station, a man looking like a platelayer has been seen walking along swinging a lantern, and he has the ability to walk through walls and doors. A steam train with three coaches has been reported travelling soundlessly along the formation of one of the old lines. Others claim to have heard this ghost train. Yet other people claim to have seen and heard it.

Newport can be described as the hub of the Isle of Wight’s former extensive railway system.

KENT

Pluckley

The strategic importance of Dover as the gateway to and exit from England inevitably meant that the building of a line between it and London was discussed at an early stage. The first company to build such a line would be able to tap into a major and lucrative source of traffic. The South Eastern Railway grabbed the opportunity, and its main line was authorised by Parliament in June 1836. The line was opened in sections and completed throughout to Dover in 1843. Pluckley is the last station before Ashford on the line from London.

Pluckley has the reputation of being England’s most haunted village. The ghosts come in various forms and several are associated with the local landowning family, the Derings. A ‘Red Lady’ wearing a fifteenth-century gown flits around the church and the churchyard, apparently searching for the burial place of her baby. The family lived in a manor house nearby which burnt down, but the site is haunted by a ‘White Lady’ holding a red rose who occasionally also puts in an appearance in the churchyard. Mysterious noises have been heard issuing from the Dering chapel in the church. There is a pub with a poltergeist, a ghostly monk, a ghostly miller and a spectral tramp (piquant variations on normal themes), a spooky old gypsy woman and the ghost of a highwayman who, as his kind tend to do, lurks by a crossroads which in this case has the lovely name of Fright Corner. Others could be mentioned. Just for good measure, the railways have got in on the act. The ghost of a man knocked down and killed by a train has been seen on the track near the station,and steam trains have been heard whistling on many occasions since regular steam operations ceased. No one claims to have seen the locomotive doing the whistling.

A weather-boarded station building, very appropriate to Kent. This all looks very peaceful given that some people say that Pluckley is the most haunted village in England.

LANCASHIRE

Bispham

Blackpool and trams are as inseparable as fish and chips. Trams started operating in Blackpool in 1885 along part of the seafront, and this line was actually the first electric street tramway in Britain. By 1892 these trams were operating between the North and South Pier.

In 1898 a more ambitious operation was started by the Blackpool & Fleetwood Electric Tramway Co. which linked Blackpool North Station with Fleetwood via a line which mostly ran close to the coast and which included stretches of reserved track. In 1920 Blackpool Corporation bought the company and combined its operations with their own.

Trams started becoming unfashionable in the UK in the 1930s, being thought of as outdated and too redolent of the working class and of Victorian England. Much of Blackpool’s tram system was replaced by motor buses and the only route to survive has been that on the continuously built-up part of The Fylde between Starr Gate and Fleetwood. It is now operated by Blackpool Transport Services Limited.

A few miles north of central Blackpool is the suburb of Bispham. Here at the northern extremity of the resort’s famous ‘illuminations’ is one of the most grandiose tram stops anywhere in the world. Vastly outdoing many of today’s minimalist unmanned railway halts, this building draws attention to itself by the words ‘Bispham Station’ incised above what can only be described as a portico. It was built in 1932. After having waxed so enthusiastic about this tram station, the authors have to accept that its connection with the world of ghosts is something of an anti-climax. On stormy nights a figure has been seen close to the station, walking purposefully along the track and carrying a lamp. As with so many of its kind, this mysterious figure vanishes when approached. No one seems to have any idea who he is and why he chooses to walk only in bad weather.

Entwistle

The line through Entwistle opened in 1848. It joined the important industrial towns of Bolton and Blackburn and came under the control of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway. This line passes through surprisingly green countryside giving the lie to the idea that south Lancashire was all satanic mills and chimneys. The station, which is located on a long climb from Bolton at 1 in 74, stood about 690ft above sea level and is a bleak spot for much of the time. It was an odd station with an island platform and an elevated signal box on girders straddling the tracks bypassing the platform. The line, now reduced to two tracks, is still operational although reduced in importance and carrying much less traffic.

In the late 1930s there were several occasions when the ethereal-looking figure of a child was seen running across the tracks and then, still running, crossing fields before disappearing into the distance. All who saw this apparition believed it to be the ghost of a young boy who had been run down and killed by a train during the First World War.

This unfortunate boy was not the only supernatural entity that inhabited the hills and valleys of the north-west of England, especially Lancashire. A more terrifying one was that experienced by a signalman in his lonely eyrie at Entwistle. On many occasions he heard the dreaded eldritch cry of a boggart. It is this chilling cry which has earned the boggart its alternative name of ‘shrieker’, although in some parts of the north it goes by the other names such as ‘barguest’ or ‘trash’. Regarded as an omen of death, the boggart usually takes the form of an enormous black or white dog, shaggy, fierce and with enormous staring eyes. Boggarts can take human form and are usually malevolent, but well-wishing boggarts were sometimes known to help out with tedious household chores. The rugged moors around Entwistle are excellent boggart country. The presence of these beings is remembered in the name of a public park in north Manchester called Boggart Hole Clough.

Entwistle Station on the Bolton to Blackburn line can be a bleak spot. The route was once busy enough to warrant quadruple tracks. Note the elevated signal box to give the signalman the best view of the tracks under his control.

Helmshore to Ramsbottom

The origin of the East Lancashire Railway lies with a line opened in 1846 linking Manchester to Bury via Clifton Junction and Radcliffe. This then proceeded along the Rossendale Valley through such delightful sounding places as Ramsbottom and Summerseat to Rawtenstall. An extension from Stubbins, just north of Ramsbottom, to Accrington, complete with ferocious gradients around Baxenden as steep as 1 in 38 and 1 in 40, was opened in 1848. The ELR was later absorbed by the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway.

Mysterious happenings occurred on the southern stretch of this line between Helmshore and Ramsbottom in the late 1950s. The platelayers and gangers who maintained the track in those days were a tough lot, prepared to be out in all weathers and able to do heavy physical work as well as paying scrupulous attention to the state of the track, an attention which could make the vital difference between safety and disaster. They were also a close-knit lot, which didn’t mean that they necessarily all got on well with each other!

Two of the men in the gang certainly seemed to have it in for each other. What had started as good-natured banter turned increasingly edgy with personal insults, and then degenerated further into fisticuffs. On several occasions the men had to be separated and prevented from doing serious injury to each other. This culminated in tragedy. The gang were checking a stretch of track between the stations when one of the men, some distance ahead of the others, found that the door of a platelayer’s cabin was open. These little buildings contained tools and other equipment and made tempting targets for thieves. He entered, whereupon he was followed in by another of the gang who dealt him such a blow on the head that it killed him instantly. The assailant was one of the men who were at loggerheads and he had mistaken the man who went into the cabin for the work-mate he so much hated.

It wasn’t long before the scene of this tragedy gained the nickname ‘The Murder Cabin’. Nor was it long before the ghost of the murdered man made his presence felt. The men came to call the spectre ‘George’, which was odd because that hadn’t been his name when he was alive. The first time one of the gang encountered George was when he was forced to take shelter during a torrential thunderstorm. It certainly knows how to rain in this part of Lancashire! He sat on an old barrow waiting for the storm to ease when a man walked in who he recognised as George and went and stood in the furthest dark corner without saying a word. This was odd but it didn’t particularly bother the ganger. The rain stopped and out came the sun. He got up and went outside, to be followed by the spectre which then simply vanished into thin air. He decided to keep his experience to himself in case his mates thought he was off his trolley. On another occasion the whole gang were crushed together in the cabin sheltering from a storm when the same figure walked in, passed through the press of bodies as if they weren’t there and went to stand in the same dark corner. They all recognised George and scarcely batted an eyelid, knowing that he had the habit of returning to the scene of his death. It was clear that they all accepted George as the resident ghost.

Passenger services over this stretch of line ceased in 1966, the withdrawal of freight trains followed and the track was dismantled, some of the formation now being used by the A56 road. And that’s progress?

LEICESTERSHIRE

Rothley

Rothley is one of the four stations on the restored Great Central Railway. The origins of the Great Central lie in a number of railway companies which amalgamated to form the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway in 1847. This company was sometimes derided as the ‘Money Sunk & Lost’. In fact the company developed its operations on a complicated network of lines cutting an east to west swathe from Cleethorpes through North Lincolnshire, South Yorkshire, into South Lancashire, Cheshire, Merseyside, as far as Wrexham in North Wales, sometimes by arrangements with other companies. The MS&L moved vast quantities of freight and mineral traffic, especially coal, over these lines.

In 1864 the company came under the chairmanship of Edward Watkin (later Sir Edward), a ruthless and ambitious entrepreneur who was not content with its provincial nature and was determined that it should have an extension to London. Even that wasn’t enough because he then proposed that, via the lines of other companies he controlled, this route would be further extended to the Kent coast and, through a tunnel under the Channel, would connect his railway empire with various major cities on the Continent. A grand vision indeed!

Pushing aside those who argued that another line from the North to London wasn’t needed, he launched the building of the ‘London Extension’ from near Annesley, north of Nottingham, through the latter city, Leicester and Rugby, to Quainton in Buckinghamshire and then, by arrangement with the Metropolitan Railway and a short piece of its own line, to a station in London at Marylebone. This new operation was to be called the ‘Great Central Railway’.

The line was built on a magnificent scale, heavily engineered to minimise gradients. It was truly a high-speed route and, as further evidence of Watkin’s grandiose scheme, it was built to accommodate continental rolling stock which has a more generous loading gauge than is normal in Britain. The story of its decline in the 1950s and ’60s under the stewardship of British Railways has often been told and never fails to arouse emotions. Be that as it may, the bulk of the line was closed, although a residual service was kept from Rugby to Arkwright Street Station in Nottingham, this finally being withdrawn in 1969.

Rothley still sees trains because an eight-mile stretch from the northern suburbs of Leicester to Loughborough was restored and reopened by the Great Central Railway as a heritage line. Each of the four stations has a time theme, and Rothley’s is the period shortly before the First World War. As well as providing a delightful evocation of train travel in those far-off days, Rothley Station has acquired the reputation of being haunted. Ghosts present are said to include that of a former stationmaster who fusses about self-importantly marshalling passengers who, like him, are dressed in Edwardian fashions. The supporting cast includes very occasionally an aged, stooped man said to be a former signalman, a young and very smart woman flourishing a parasol and a lady who is slightly anachronistic because she is dressed in Victorian modes.

LINCOLNSHIRE

Barkston

Barkston is a few miles north of Grantham and is the place where the East Coast Main Line crosses the Nottingham to Sleaford, Boston and Skegness route. There was formerly a triangular junction at Barkston, one side of which was a south to east curve allowing trains from Grantham to proceed directly to Skegness or, via Leadenham, to Lincoln. A north to east curve allowed trains from the Newark and Doncaster to access the Skegness line directly while the western side of the triangle was the East Coast Main Line. All these lines were built by the Great Northern Railway. Until 1955 there was a small station on the main line at the southern end of the triangle.

At one time locomotives fresh from building or repair at Doncaster Works would be given a gentle running-in by travelling from Doncaster, taking the north to east curve to Barkston East Junction, reversing from there to Barkston South Junction and then, facing north, returning to Doncaster where their drivers would report any faults that needed rectifying before the locomotives were given final clearance from the works. These locomotives might be from Scotland or the north-east of England, and some of them might not normally be seen so far south. This meant that the Barkston area attracted trainspotters eager to underline such exotic beasts in their dog-eared Ian Allan abcs. Trainspotters had much in common with twitchers.

At one time numerous reports were received of a mysterious figure that crossed the line perilously close to advancing trains and much to the annoyance and concern of their drivers. The same figure was also seen scaling the ladders up to the arms of the old-fashioned somersault semaphore signals as if to inspect the oil lamps to ensure they were functioning correctly. It was not unknown for trainspotters to do foolish things while showing off to their mates. Was this figure the ghost of some forgotten trainspotter re-enacting the foolhardy actions of the past? Or is there some other explanation? Trainspotters these days are far fewer in number. No one has seen the spectre of Barkston for nearly fifty years.

The East Coast Main Line and the Skegness line are still operational. The Barkston Junctions, however, are no more.

Bourne

Bourne is a pleasant small town in south Lincolnshire. It was once the junction of lines that radiated to all four cardinal points. The first of these was the Bourne & Essendine Railway which was opened in May 1860 and gave the town access to the route of the Great Northern Railway from London that became known as the East Coast Main Line. This company was absorbed by the Great Northern in 1864, and it enjoyed a slow and somnolent existence until 1951 when it closed completely. In August 1866 the Spalding & Bourne Railway opened and later became part of a company with greater ambitions, as suggested by its name: the Midland & Eastern Railway. In 1872 the Great Northern Railway opened its route to Sleaford from Bourne, this closing to passengers in 1930. The final opening was that in 1894 of the line to Little Bytham Junction and Saxby to the west. This and the line eastwards to Spalding became part of the Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway and its fabled cross-country route from the Norfolk coast to the East Midlands.

Many existing buildings were taken over and adapted for railway use in Britain in the nineteenth century, and one of the most interesting is Red Hall at Bourne. Although the origins of the hall are not absolutely certain, it is thought to have been built around 1600 and almost certainly by a member of the local Fisher dynasty. Later on in the seventeenth century it came into the hands of the Digby family. This has led to the emergence of a local myth which has almost taken on the status of received wisdom. This avers that the Red Hall has a connection with the family of Sir Everard Digby, one of the chief conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The myth has shamelessly been expanded by those who say that Red Hall was one of the meeting points of the conspirators while they were planning their dastardly deed. Never letting the truth get in the way of a good story, it has even been alleged that Red Hall is haunted by the ghosts of some of the gunpowder plotters!

In 1857 Red Hall was sold to the Bourne & Essendine Railway Co. It was within a few yards of the railway and it became a rather grand stationmaster’s house and ticket office. It later came under the ownership of the M&GN Railway who decided that it was no longer suitable for their purposes and it was proposed for demolition. This suggestion created an absolute furore in the town, and the locals, with the assistance of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, were successful in preventing the demolition from going ahead.

Passenger trains ceased at Bourne in February 1959 when large parts of the M&GN lost their passenger and in some cases all their services, closing completely. Freight services were withdrawn from the town in 1965. Red Hall became redundant when passenger trains finished and its condition was allowed to deteriorate until once more it became a candidate for demolition. Fortunately in 1962 it was acquired by the Bourne United Charities and, with the aid of various grants, an expensive repair and refurbishment was done. It then became a community resource greatly appreciated by the townsfolk.

One of the authors used to present courses for the Workers’ Educational Association in a room in Red Hall. One particular course was held on ten winter evenings, and on those occasions a key-holder would appear a few minutes before the meetings were due to start in order to open the building up. The author liked to prowl around the grassy area surrounding the hall, even in the dark, and to speculate about what the place must have been like when there was considerable railway activity so close by. He remembers very clearly his surprise when one night he arrived about half an hour early and found the door open but no lights on in the building. Deliberately not turning the lights on, he decided to have a look at the rooms upstairs. They were very atmospheric in the almost total darkness, but not threatening in any way. There was nobody about. He made his way back down to the room on the ground floor where the meetings took place, still with ten or so minutes to spare. He remembers even more clearly how he then heard the clear and unmistakeable sound of creaking floorboards as someone moved around in one of the upstairs rooms. The key-holder was amazed to find him installed because the hall had been left locked. Was it a human intruder or someone from the ‘other side’ in Red Hall that winter’s evening?

Front of Red Hall, Bourne. Few main station buildings in small country towns were located in such distinguished premises.

Red Hall from the south.

Claxby & Usselby

This station served two settlements with strong Scandinavian origins as indicated in the ‘-by’ element in their names. As so often happened, the station was not located very conveniently for either of them. It was on the line originally built by the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway (later the Great Central) from Lincoln through Market Rasen to Barnetby and Grimsby, and it opened for business in 1848.

In the 1960s tragedy struck in the signal box when the signalman on duty suffered a sudden and fatal heart attack. Subsequently other men working in the box heard a variety of strange and inexplicable noises which included a disembodied voice. What sent shivers through them was the fact that they knew the voice. It was unmistakable. It was that of their deceased colleague!

The line is still operational but the station closed in March 1960.

Elsham

Elsham was a small wayside station on what became the line of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway (later Great Central Railway) between Doncaster, Barnetby and Grimsby. This stretch of line was opened in 1866. Close to where the line crosses the Ancholme River an accident occurred in the 1920s in which four people were killed. Fog in Britain is not what it used to be, but during the period from 1930 to the 1950s there were strange reports that on those occasions when a fog descended an eerie stationary steam locomotive could be seen, the fiery glow from its furnace visible from afar. No one has claimed a sighting since. The line through the former Elsham Station is still operational.

Elsham; a typical wayside station of the former Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, known to many as the ‘Money, Sunk and Lost’ railway!

French Drove

The line from Spalding to March was built by the Great Northern Railway Co. and opened in 1867. In 1882 it became part of the Great Northern & Great Eastern Joint Railway Co. The line, for all that it passed through the heart of the rural Lincolnshire Fens, was a very heavily used major goods and mineral route, part of a system joining the coal-producing districts of west and south Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire to the coal-starved districts of East Anglia and, more particularly, London.

French Drove Station had had a period when it was known as French Drove and Gedney Hill. The latter part of the name is a commentary on the relative nature of language. Any piece of land protruding more than a couple of feet above the extraordinarily uniform flatness of the Fens constitutes a hill in these parts. The station closed to passenger traffic in September 1961 and the station house was put on the market. A family from outside the district moved in, and they were slightly nonplussed when a local postmistress told them in no uncertain terms that the house they had moved into was haunted.

The family was a level-headed lot, not taking this kind of information too seriously. However, it wasn’t long before strange occurrences were happening in their new home. This they were renovating themselves, the house needing a lot of work to make it liveable in. Their mail was usually delivered by a post lady on a bicycle. One morning they had made an early start and were beavering away busily when they heard a woman’s voice by the front door, which they often left open on warm days. They assumed that it was the friendly post lady and one of them went to greet her. No one was there. No post either – it came later that day. This was puzzling, but the woman’s voice was soon forgotten as they buckled down to work again.

A few weeks later a youngish man knocked on their door. He told them that he had worked at the station a few years ago, was revisiting the area and had to come to have a look for sentimental reasons, and was curious as to who was occupying the house now that passengers no longer came and went – not that there’d been many in the latter years, anyway. He was very pleasant and they invited him in for a cup of tea. He had plenty of memories of the old days and kept them interested, but they certainly pricked up their ears when he told them that many years previously a stationmaster had hanged himself in the room above the former ticket office. His wife used to help out by closing the station at night, and when it was dark she attended to these duties carrying a lantern because the station, like so many others in the depths of the countryside, was ill-lit. She herself hadn’t been able to face life without her husband, and she simply lost the will to live, withered away and died not long after his death. The man told them that a figure carrying a lamp was often seen in the vicinity of the station during the hours of darkness, which is why many of the locals avoided going anywhere near the place if at all possible. Everyone felt that the place was haunted.

This revelation inevitably had a slightly dampening effect on their enthusiasm for the building and renovation work they were doing on the house. This feeling became much stronger a few months later when, last thing at night, one of the family spotted what looked like a lamp being carried along the formation of the old line, 100 yards or so away. He called the others who all agreed about what they saw. A few restless nights followed until they discovered that it was actually the lamp on the bike belonging to a man who lived in a former crossing-keeper’s cottage a mile or two down the line and who used often to take a shortcut home where once the trains had thundered past at all hours of the day and night.

This still left the mystery of the woman’s voice early that morning and the tales of apparitions around the old station so gloatingly repeated by the locals.

The late Sir John Betjeman neatly captured the feeling of the Fens at night with these lines from A Lincolnshire Tale in his New Bats in Old Belfries published in 1945: 

The remoteness was awful, the stillness intense,

Of invisible fenland, around and immense;

The line through French Drove which once witnessed the romantic boat train that ran from Harwich Parkeston Quay to Liverpool suffered as the volume of coal and general freight traffic on the railways declined in the 1970s. The boat train itself was diverted away to travel via Peterborough and Nottingham in 1973, and the rot then really set in, the local passenger services between March and Spalding being withdrawn in 1982. The last freight trains followed not long after.

Grantham

A horrific accident occurred at Grantham on a September night in 1906. An Anglo-Scottish express conveying sleeping carriages, ordinary passenger accommodation and some parcel-vans had left King’s Cross at 20.45 and called only at Peterborough where a relief footplate crew and fresh locomotive took over. It was a calm and clear night, the train was on time and the two men on the footplate were known to be steady and conscientious. The locomotive was a large-boilered Great Northern Ivatt Atlantic, No.276, which was a ‘good-un’ and in tip-top mechanical condition. The next scheduled stop was Grantham, about thirty-five minutes away.

The station staff at Grantham were making ready for the train’s arrival and a handful of passengers were standing waiting, poised, if at all possible, to find empty compartments and compose themselves for undisturbed sleep. To the consternation of all on the platform, the train entered the platform road at a speed of about 40mph, clearly with no intention of stopping. Consternation quickly turned to horror and dread as the train took the turn-out for the Nottingham line and then a reverse curve. The tender derailed, hitting the parapet of a bridge and making a sound like an explosion followed by a sickening and never-to-be-forgotten series of crunching and wrenching noises as the rest of the train piled up behind it. Some of the carriages tumbled down the embankment and caught fire. Even the carriages left on the track ignited as burning coal from the firebox flew in all directions. They were, of course, all wooden-bodied in those days. Driver and fireman, eleven passengers and a postal sorter lost their lives.

No satisfactory explanation for the accident was ever given in spite of the usual scrupulous inquiry and report. The signals at the north end of the platform were at danger to allow a goods train from the Nottingham direction to have the road onto the Peterborough line, crossing the path of the Anglo-Scottish express. The distant signal protecting these points had correctly been set at caution, but the express, which all the witnesses said had not applied its brakes, went through the danger signals and then fatally took the tracks to Nottingham. These points were of course interlocked with those from the Nottingham direction, and were not intended to be taken at such a speed, but it was almost certainly the following reverse curve that caused the train to derail with such disastrous consequences. ‘Explanations’ varied from the driver and fireman mistaking where they were as the train approached Grantham, driver and fireman engaged in a fight to the death on the footplate, and one or other of them suddenly being taken ill and his mate going to assist him. All these were rendered unlikely given the evidence of the signalman in Grantham South signal box, that when the train passed him both men were correctly at their posts on either side of the footplate observing the line ahead through the windows in the front of the locomotive’s cab. When all possible explanations had been eliminated, the impossible kicked in and there were suggestions that the driver and fireman had been mesmerised by the appearance of a ghost. The exact truth about the accident at Grantham will never be known.

About twenty years later a keen student of locomotive performance caught a train from London to York. The locomotive was the old 276, now renumbered as LNER 3276. It was a very undistinguished run and the train was about ten minutes late into York. It was not scheduled to stop at Grantham and the observer was very puzzled by the fact that the train slowed to little more than 20mph as it passed through Grantham, even though all the signals were clear. At York he spoke to the driver and asked him why he had proceeded so slowly through Grantham. The driver unblushingly told him that 3276 was a jinxed locomotive and with that particular day being the anniversary of the Grantham smash, he had taken no chances just in case the engine decided to take the wrong road once more. No drivers or firemen mourned the day that No.3276 went off to be scrapped at Doncaster Works.

Grantham Station looking south. The accident occurred on the curve behind the photographer.

Grimsby

In its heyday, Grimsby was probably the largest fishing port in the world. It owed its importance to the railways. In 1845 parliamentary authority was given to proposals for a number of lines in north Lincolnshire which would link up with a projected line to Sheffield. These lines went on to become part of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, and this in turn became the Great Central Railway. The other company that gained rail access to Grimsby was the Great Northern, and this was by means of the East Lincolnshire line from Peterborough through Spalding, Boston and Louth. The MS&LR opened the first fish dock at Grimsby in 1856. By the 1890s Grimsby was handling a quarter of all the rail-borne fish traffic in England and Wales. In conjunction with the development of steam-powered trawlers, the railways effected a huge improvement in the diet of the British working class because they made fresh fish relatively cheap and available across the whole of the country.

Trains of special vans for the fresh fish traffic were marshalled in sidings between Grimsby and Cleethorpes. These trains were continuously braked so that they could run at the high speed which was necessary given the perishable nature of the payload, the brakes of course being controlled by the driver in the locomotive. For the brakes to work, the vacuum pipes of all the wagons had to be carefully connected to each other and that on the leading van to the locomotive’s tender. The problem was that a section of the sidings where these trains were made up developed a sinister reputation in the 1950s, so much so that some men refused to work in them on the night shift.

The following is an example of the kind of thing that happened all too frequently. One night the shunter had connected up all the pipes, working as quickly as he could because he never liked the atmosphere in this part of the yard. He could never quite put his finger on why he had this feeling. On this particular night it seemed more menacing than ever. When the driver tested the pressure, it was evident that one or more of the vacuum pipes on the vans were not properly connected. Another shunter went along the train and couldn’t find any problem. Still the pressure was way below that required. The engine driver was getting impatient as the time for departure was looming, and these trains were tightly timed. A third shunter volunteered to examine the connections, and as he left the comforting presence of the others he felt as if there was some unseen and malevolent being ready to waylay him. This feeling became stronger and stronger, and it did not help when the light in his powerful torch started flickering and then dimmed. His sense that something sinister was there was bad enough, but then an awful stench assailed his nostrils. It was the stench of bodily corruption. He could not find anything amiss with the connections and he made his way back, almost running, such was his state of mind. The driver checked the vacuum for the third time. The pressure hadn’t changed. By now the driver was hopping mad and he gave the shunters a piece of his mind. They then agreed that he would lead them all for one final check. If there was anything wrong they would find it this time. They had to do so or the train would be late leaving and questions would be asked. With a marked lack of enthusiasm they followed him using their torches to probe the baleful darkness. All the torches flickered and dimmed at the same spot, and then came the smell. Even the driver was affected by the sense of evil; the others were literally sweating and shaking with fear. However, the driver found a loose connection which he quickly put right and they all got out of that loathsome place, quite unashamedly running in order to do so.

Some years later a man committed suicide exactly at the spot where the sense of evil was strongest. When it was dark in the sidings, he knelt down and placed his neck on the track. His head was severed as the wheels of a van passed over it. Was there a connection?

Unfortunately no fresh fish traffic now goes by rail. The line between Grimsby and Cleethorpes is still operational.

The haunted sidings for fish traffic were between Grimsby Docks and New Clee Station.

Hallington

The line of the Great Northern Railway from Louth to Bardney went through the heart of the Lincolnshire Wolds. It traversed some remote and beautiful countryside which even in the twenty-first century remains comparatively little-known. It was not very promising territory for a railway, even in the headily optimistic days of the mid-nineteenth century, and the building of the 971-yard-long Withcall Tunnel proved particularly troublesome. The line was sanctioned in 1866 but not opened until 1876. It did not earn enough even to pay the interest on the capital borrowed to build it! In 1883 it was bought by the Great Northern Railway, a trifle unwillingly, at a knockdown price. They didn’t really know what to do with it. It slumbered on providing a useful service for a smattering of local people and being of assistance to the farming communities of this part of Lincolnshire, but the passenger trains were withdrawn as early as November 1951. Goods trains lingered on for a few years but eventually succumbed to the inevitable.

Hallington is one of several locations in the UK where people claim to have heard the ghostly sound of steam trains puffing through the night many years after services ceased. The sound of a steam locomotive hard at work is pretty unmistakeable. How is it to be explained?

Hibaldstow Crossing

Scawby and Hibaldstow was a wayside station on the line of the former Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway (later Great Central Railway) from Cleethorpes and Grimsby through Brigg, Gainsborough, Retford and Worksop to Sheffield, completed in 1849.

A few miles west of Hallington Station was Withcall where the line passed under the Lincolnshire Wolds in a tunnel over half a mile long. This is lonely country and it takes little imagination to hear a ghost train’s shrieking whistle as it emerges from this forbidding tunnel.

Just north-east of the station, which was mid-way between the two villages it served, a minor road crossed the railway on the flat, and there the railway company built a gatekeeper’s cabin with a small cottage adjacent. Manning this crossing meant a lonely vigil, particularly at night. Emerging every so often from the relative cosiness of the cabin on a wet or freezing night to open and close the gates was not everybody’s idea of the best way to earn a crust. Hibaldstow Crossing was a bleak and exposed spot.

In the middle of the 1920s the regular crossing-keeper was off work due to illness and his duties were being temporarily covered by a porter deputed from Scawby and Hibaldstow Station. What on the face of it appeared to be a simple task, that of opening and closing the crossing gates in response to indicators from the signal boxes on either side saying that a train was approaching, in reality required alertness and adroit timing. Unfortunately the stand-in crossing-keeper was not up to the job and he was knocked down and killed by a train while opening the gates – unfortunately for him, not quickly enough.

It seems that the unfortunate man may have died and been buried but his spirit could not tear itself away from the scene of his death. Subsequent crossing-keepers came to hate night duty at Hibaldstow Crossing because their shifts were often interrupted by the sound of very measured footsteps approaching and passing their lonely little cabin. Those men intrepid enough to emerge to issue a challenge were made to look stupid because nothing was ever to be seen. The other men who were understandably reluctant to leave their little haven to investigate the darkness outside looked like simple cowards. These noises were heard on many occasions and by many different men, and the only explanation they had was that the footsteps were those of the ghost of the unfortunate temporary crossing-keeper.

Scawby and Hibaldstow Station closed in 1968 and the ‘haunted’ crossing nearby was converted to automatic barriers in 1966, but the line through this area, while still operating, could with justification be described as a ‘ghost railway’. This line, almost incredibly, only operates on Saturdays with three trains in each direction stopping at the remaining intermediate stations of Brigg, Kirton Lindsey and Gainsborough Central. Attempts to close the line in the late 1980s aroused ferocious protests, but when, in 1991, all the other trains were withdrawn and this derisory service was introduced, little or nothing was said. A passenger who missed the last train to Cleethorpes on a Saturday would have to wait seven nights and six days for the next train. In the cold comfort of a bus shelter masquerading as a railway station, this would indeed be a long wait.

Tallington

There is a busy level crossing at Tallington where the A16 crosses the East Coast Main Line close to the southern extremity of Lincolnshire. The signaller in the box which controls the crossing can make himself immensely unpopular when he gives precedence to what can sometimes be a long succession of trains on this impressive stretch of quadruple track and equally impressive queues of impatient road-users build up. The station at this point closed in 1959.

This location is reputedly haunted by the ghost of a man who jumped off the old footbridge. The ghost appears on the anniversary of this event, thought to be 15 January. His wife had died and the poor fellow simply couldn’t handle life on his own.

MERSEYSIDE

James Street

Railway passenger services under the River Mersey between James Street, Liverpool, and Hamilton Square, Birkenhead, began in 1886. Short extensions were soon made at either end. Before the tunnel existed, those wanting to travel between the Wirral and Liverpool and vice versa were forced to take a ferry. The river could be distinctly choppy, the wind cold and strong enough to knock the unwary off their feet, and an impenetrable and damp fog might blanket the river and cause delays as the constant sound of invisible ships’ sirens boomed out, warning of the hazards lying in wait for the ferry which perforce had to cross the shipping lanes virtually at right angles.

The trains were much quicker and were not affected by climatic conditions, but in the early years the Mersey Railway was steam-operated. The locomotives had to be powerful enough to drag themselves and their carriages up gradients as steep as 1 in 27. They were supposed to consume their own smoke and condense their steam, but in practice they turned the atmosphere in subterranean stations like James Street and Hamilton Square into something so oppressive that travellers rediscovered their loyalty to the ferries. Freezing in fresh air on the ferries seemed preferable to subterranean near-asphyxiation. However, in 1903 the loss-making Mersey Railway was electrified. It became the first railway in Britain to be entirely converted from steam to electric multiple-unit operation. The problem was that travellers from place like Rock Ferry, Wallasey and West Kirby, served by the Wirral Railway, had to put up with the inconvenience of changing trains to join the Mersey Railway for the quick run under the river.

The possibility of electrifying the Wirral Railway network was voiced time and time again, but the 1920s and ’30s were not good times for many areas of Britain’s economy, including that of Merseyside. Eventually the Government made money available for capital projects to try to kick start the economy. Work on the electrification started in 1936 and the Wirral and Mersey parts of what was then the London Midland & Scottish Railway were integrated. The very modernistic and comfortable electric trains began running in March 1938. People living in the northern end of the Wirral must have thought all their birthdays had come at once.

In the 1950s two young people, a boy and his girlfriend, had been celebrating St Valentine’s Day by visiting two or three pubs in the city centre of Liverpool. They felt pleasantly relaxed as they made their way to James Street Station to catch their train back to Leasowe in the Wirral. They descended to the platform and sat down, noticing a woman sitting on another bench nearby. She was certainly rather noticeable. She was dressed in curiously old-fashioned clothes, but somehow managed to be elegant because of the obvious quality of the clothes she was wearing and also because of the way she wore them. She sat stock-still, seemingly preoccupied by her thoughts. The train arrived and the lady and the young couple got into the same carriage, it being empty of other passengers. All three sat down, the woman a couple of bays away. The train doors slid closed and the train moved off along the tunnel under the murky waters of the Mersey. Just before Hamilton Square the couple looked up. The woman had vanished. Except for themselves, the carriage was absolutely empty!

The lad even got up and walked the length of the carriage. They knew they were not mistaken – the woman had got on with them and had disappeared into thin air. For years after they would ponder over the events of that night. What was the story behind the disappearing woman? Had they seen a ghost?

The Water Street entrance to James Street Station on the underground section of the Mersey Railway sported this delightful sign advertising its electric trains which ran under the Mersey from Liverpool to the Cheshire shore at Birkenhead. The line is now part of Merseyrail.

Trains still run under the Mersey, but the new generation of electric multiple units do not have the same style or comfort as the solid rolling stock of the late 1930s.

Walton Junction

‘Walton Junction’ is a curious name for this station because it is not, nor has it ever been, a junction. It is, however, in the Walton district of north-east Liverpool. It is on a line promoted by the Liverpool, Ormskirk & Preston Railway, work on the building of which started in 1847. It eventually came to be part of the empire of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway. The line is still operational, being part of the Merseyrail network as far as Ormskirk.

1968 was the last year of the regular use of steam locomotives on the standard-gauge lines of British Railways, and virtually all the remaining ‘steamers’ were concentrated in the north-west of England. They were a pretty woebegone lot by this time. They suffered from little maintenance and less cleaning, but the steam locomotive is a rugged machine and somehow they maintained a certain dignity even in their last gasps. They may have been run-down but they were still fascinating machines to watch, and many people were only too aware that their removal from the scene represented a historic watershed. They were a direct link with the Industrial Revolution and the coal, iron and heavy manufacturing industries which had been so dominant when Britain was ‘the workshop of the world’. De-industrialisation was changing the face of the country and the lives of the people, and not everyone was sure that it was for the good. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of railway enthusiasts descended on the north-west of England to see steam playing out its last painful months.

In the mid-1960s a Liverpool man used to take his son to Walton Junction to watch the few remaining steam trains. For the young lad, excitement at the prospect of seeing a ‘steamer’ was tempered by the horrible feelings of fear he always got when reaching a certain point on the path beside the railway line. He always felt that something malevolent was watching him, but he was afraid to tell his dad. In 1975 he returned to Walton Junction and walked along the self-same path, this time with two friends. During the intervening years it had become rather more unkempt and the young man, for that is what he now was, remembered the past but thought that the fear he had always encountered was perhaps nothing more than a childish whimsy. He told them nothing of the feelings he used to experience at this spot and was amazed when both his friends said they felt something nasty in the place. They said it was as if they were being watched by someone or something evil. Shortly afterwards the three young men returned, this time with a girl making up the party. They told her nothing, but likewise she said that she felt something dangerous and couldn’t wait to get away.

When the man had children of his own, he made yet another return to Walton Junction and he walked the familiar footpath, now even more ramshackle, with them. They didn’t seem to sense anything untoward, but he realised that he was marshalling them along the footpath as quickly as possible and constantly looking over his shoulder – for what? Close to the station was a row of cottages that once used to house railway workers and their families. Occupied the last time he had been there, they were now a sad and derelict eyesore. Unwanted and empty, they were waiting for the demolition men. With the children he stood and gazed at the cottages for a moment when suddenly there was a loud bang from the back of one of them, a bang as if someone had slammed a door using excessive force. Now he had an awful reprise of his childish feelings of horror. Gathering the children together, he hurried away with no backward glances. He hasn’t been back to Walton Junction since then but he often wonders what it is that spooks the place. He only has to think ‘Walton Junction’ and the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

This station, now called Walton (Merseyside), used to be called Walton Junction, which is odd because it never was a junction.

NORFOLK

Abbey and West Dereham

East Anglia had several extremely rustic branch lines. ‘Twigs’ rather than branches might have been a more appropriate word. One such was the line from Denver to Stoke Ferry. Although it was built by the obscure Downham & Stoke Ferry Railway Co., the line was always operated by the Great Eastern Railway and fully absorbed by it on 1 January 1898. It had opened in 1882 and was built primarily to serve the farming community. The line lost its meagre passenger service in 1930. Freight traffic ceased in the mid-1960s, and the line was soon ripped up.

A couple who lived at West Dereham had a strange experience in the 1950s. By this time freight trains ran only ‘as required’, which wasn’t very often, and so they were surprised to be woken up by the sound of a train in the middle of the night. To their amazement, they could see that it was a passenger train composed of a steam locomotive and two carriages with their compartments lit up. It was 3.00 in the morning. Even in its heyday, and it never really had one, no passenger trains ran on the line at that hour and, anyway, passenger services had been withdrawn about twenty-five years previously. As the sound of the train petered out into the distance, they scratched and pinched themselves and asked whether they had been seeing things. None the wiser for their ruminations, they eventually returned to bed and sleep. The man told his workmates about the train the next morning and they just laughed. By now seriously confused, the couple went down to the railway that evening. Weeds were growing on the track; a signal post leant at a crazy angle; everything looked semi-derelict. What is more, there was a thick coating of rust on the rails. It was obvious that no train had passed for weeks. What did the couple see that night from their window in West Dereham?

The rather stylish frontage of Norwich Station was built in 1886. This station used to be called Norwich (Thorpe) to distinguish it from three other stations that used to serve the city. There is no sign of the Norwich Station horror.

NORTH YORKSHIRE

Middlesborough

Middlesborough owes its existence to the railway. The Stockton & Darlington Railway was opened in 1825 with the purpose of conveying coal from the pits of south-west Durham to the River Tees at Stockton. The river at Stockton proved difficult to navigate for the large collier vessels and so what would now be called a ‘greenfield site’, located by deeper water, was chosen, and the S&D was extended to it in 1830. This was the origin of Middlesborough. The town grew with extraordinary rapidity as it became a major industrial centre with iron and steel-making and extensive docks. In 1831 the population was 383; in 1841 5,709; 1881 56,000 and in 1911 109,000.

All the lines in the Middlesborough area came under the control of the North Eastern Railway, who rebuilt the station in 1877 in the then fashionable neo-Gothic style. In a town not noted for buildings of particular architectural merit, it is one of the best, and it looked even more distinctive when it still had its fine overall-roof.

Walking to start his shift one afternoon in the 1950s, a young railwayman saw a figure approaching and as he got closer he recognised him as a signalman with whom he was on friendly terms. He was about 20 yards away and just about to utter some kind of greeting when the signalman vanished. There was no cover or anything he could have hidden behind. The signalman was simply there one moment and gone the next. The younger man went on his way feeling confused and puzzled. Imagine how these feelings intensified when his workmates told him there had been a tragedy earlier in the day. A signalman had been run down by a train and killed. The signalman was the same man who had walked towards him and then vanished only a few minutes previously.

Middlesborough’s Victorian Gothic station interior.

Middlesborough Station at platform level. Making up in height for what it lacks in beauty is the overall roof, which was destroyed in an air raid during the Second World War.

The line through Middlesborough is still operational.

Sandsend

The line from Whitby to Loftus was authorised in 1866 and construction work by the Whitby, Redcar & Middlesborough Union Railway started in 1871. A host of problems afflicted the construction of the line and it did not open until 1884. It was absorbed by the North Eastern Railway in 1889 and closed in 1958. It offered superb views of the coast, especially at Staithes, Kettleness and Sandsend. The line had to cross the valleys carved by streams rising on the moors to the west just before they tumbled into the sea, and it did so by means of spectacular iron viaducts, the largest of which was at Staithes. The exposed nature of this particular viaduct caused it to be fitted with a wind gauge, and when gusts reached a certain speed, a bell rang in the signal box at Staithes and trains would not be allowed over the viaduct until the winds abated.

The railway in Sandsend, running from Whitby to Loftus along the cliff top behind the houses on the left, crossed the beck on a lofty viaduct and plunged into the tunnel in the cliffs in the distance. This was one of Britain’s most scenic lines.

The tunnel at Sandsend is 1,652 yards long and has gained the reputation of being haunted. Phenomena that have allegedly been seen include white lights, figures of people who seem to be able to melt away through the wall when approached, footsteps without anyone to make them and the whistle of a steam train.

NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

Burton Joyce

In 1844 the Midland Railway was created from a merger of the Midland Counties, the North Midland and the Birmingham & Derby Junction railway companies. The Midland became a major player on the national railway scene. The merger was the brainchild of the energetic, ambitious and ruthless George Hudson, one of the first, and later one of the most infamous, of the Victorian railway moguls. He built spheres of influence like the territories of an empire. He feared that what he considered as part of his fiefdom, the control of the two existing routes from York to London via Derby, was threatened by proposals to build one or more direct lines from York to London by routes considerably further east. Trying to pre-empt such a development, unsuccessfully as it happened, he built a long cross-country line from Nottingham to Lincoln via Newark-on-Trent. This line opened in 1846 and Burton Joyce, a few miles east of Nottingham, was one of the small wayside stations.

Burton Joyce Station is on the southern extremity of the village, very close to the River Trent. About thirty years ago a signalman at Burton Joyce found many of his shifts disturbed by the sound of footsteps coming along the track and then ascending the steps to his small signal box. Whenever he looked out of the box or went to the door and opened it, he never managed to see who or what it was that was making the sounds. Understandably, he felt very uneasy about these disconcerting experiences and could not decide whether to have a chat with his fellow signalmen about it or tell the inspector who appeared at the box from time to time. After all it was not a good idea for a signalman to suggest by word or act that he was seeing things – not if he wanted to keep his job, that is. Fortunately he never did the ten at night to six in the morning shift, but he was considering asking for a transfer when, one shift following another in quick succession, he came to realise that the noises which he had dreaded coming to hear had stopped. We will never know whether they were a manifestation of the restless spirit of someone perhaps killed on the line around Burton Joyce or some thoughtless prankster oblivious to the dangers of spooking someone in a position of trust and responsibility like a railway signalman. The Nottingham to Lincoln is still operational.

Mechanical signal boxes have survived repeated notices of their imminent demise and, although they are greatly reduced in numbers in the twenty-first century, a sizeable number of these anachronistic installations still exist, especially away from the lines carrying the heaviest traffic and the fastest trains. Although those who work in signal boxes are now called signallers, and there are women among their number, this book, dealing essentially with the past, will continue to call them signalmen. Hopefully this will not cause offence.

It requires a very special kind of person to cope with the demands of the job. There are many failsafe devices to assist his operations, although the signalman still needs to be steady, systematic and extremely vigilant. The requirements of the job embrace other qualities. Many signal boxes were to be found in remote spots in the depth of the countryside, and night shifts in these boxes were not for those who possessed faint hearts or too lurid an imagination. The immense darkness on certain nights; the noises of the creatures of the night as they scuttled around their beats; the bark of the fox and the call of the owl could all play havoc with man’s primeval fears. Often signal boxes were located in cuttings where the sense of remoteness could be almost tangible, and the animal noises did little to offset a feeling of all-enveloping silence. Even the presence of a country by-road some distance away, with the sound of an occasional car becoming even more occasional in the witching hours, somehow only served to emphasise the loneliness of the signalman’s post.

Then, of course, in the days of the steam railways there were the trains themselves. In the hours of darkness steam trains immediately assumed an aura of mystery, both romantic and yet also rather sinister; somewhat threatening. Smoke from the chimney was illuminated by the glare from the firebox, and as the locomotive passed, a glimpse of the men on the footplate, the driver peering into the darkness, straining to catch the small, unblinking stare of the old semaphore signals, the fireman heaving coal into the hungry maw of the firebox. More types of train were around in those days. Express passenger trains went past with a rush and a roar, occasional glimpses of snug-looking compartments made cosy by steam heating; and even faster than the passenger expresses might be the milk trains rushing their perishable cargo up to London, or the fully braked fish trains from the likes of Grimsby. Even in the still of the night, the fish trains had their own unique olfactory way of marking their passage. Hurrying parcel trains and lumbering goods and mineral trains would be signalled on their way. Meat, livestock and mail trains all passed in the night. On many lines there were more trains about between ten in the evening and six in the morning than during daytime hours.

Even the interior of the signal box seemed mysterious; the lighting was deliberately made to be dim, and what light there was focussed on the block instruments and the train register in which the movements of all trains as well as any untoward events were recorded. The further corners of the box became at night places of dim surmise, odd flickers of movement perhaps reflecting a sudden flare-up from the coal in the well-stoked stove. In the event of a big storm with thunder and lightning, the block instruments clicked as if they were possessed by invisible spirits, and little blue sparks flew as the bells rang. It was once said that a signalman’s job combined the worst features of the work of a lighthouse-keeper, the captain of a warship, the coxswain of a lifeboat and a night-watchman.

Mapperley Tunnel

Nottingham was one of many localities where bitter rivalries were fought out between railway companies vying with each other for access to sources of lucrative traffic. Here the main contenders were the Great Northern and Midland railways. Lesser players were the London & North Western and later the Great Central. The idea of transporting as much of the abundant ‘black gold’ as possible from the rich coalfields of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire attracted these companies like a pot of jam attracts flies.

In the 1870s the Great Northern opened a line skirting round the eastern fringe of Nottingham, from Colwick, which led, eventually with extensions, through the heart of the coalfield in the Leen Valley to Newstead and on to Langwith Junction, and also to Pinxton, Heanor, Derby, Burton-on-Trent and even Stafford. On the eastern section of this system, through Gedling to Daybrook, hilly terrain was encountered, and the Great Northern was forced to bore through this with Mapperley Tunnel. This tunnel caused the railway civil engineers enormous headaches over the years on account of subsidence caused by mining. In 1925 part of the roof collapsed and in the late 1950s much of the roof had to be shored up with timber. The cost of making the tunnel good eventually became prohibitive and traffic was diverted away to alternative routes. Most of the line closed in April 1960. A stub from Netherfield to Gedling remains in situ at the time of writing (December 2008) although the connection at Netherfield to the line from Nottingham to Grantham has been severed.

In the 1970s a number of children playing near the south entrance to Mapperley Tunnel claim to have heard a steam train approaching them through the tunnel despite the fact that the rails had long since been lifted and it had been sealed at its northern end.

Netherfield has its own railway ghost – a man who walks the tracks from time to time and, when challenged, just disappears.

Rolleston

This station is on the same line as Burton Joyce (above). For a little station (long since unstaffed) there is a lot of paranormal activity. It includes a man who was knocked down and killed by a train who revisits the spot, a man reading a newspaper while he waits for a train but who then disappears before the train arrives, and bells ringing in a crossing-keeper’s cottage to announce the approach of a train that never gets there.

Although the line was still busy, subsidence in Mapperley Tunnel meant that it had to be closed.

A delightful wayside station with steep gables, now a private house in Thurgarton – shame about the extension! The station is still served by trains on the Nottingham to Lincoln line. The ghostly sounds of children playing have been heard by the level crossing.

The station was formerly the junction for the Midland Railway branch line to Southwell and Mansfield. The short stub from Rolleston to Southwell outlasted the line on to Mansfield, but it closed to passengers in 1959. Southwell is one of the East Midland’s little-known and hidden gems. It has a delightful Minster (actually a cathedral) with a fine Norman nave, unique western towers capped by ‘Rhenish helms’ and a chapter house with naturalistic carvings of sufficient quality to drive the austere art historian Sir Niklaus Pevsner into raptures of joy.

Down the line towards Burton Joyce is Thurgarton where a crossing-keeper’s cottage was supposedly haunted by the sound of children at play. The manned crossing has been replaced by automatic lifting barriers.

OXFORDSHIRE

Shipton-on-Cherwell

On Christmas Eve 1874 a heavily loaded passenger train bound for Birkenhead was heading north from Oxford on the Great Western Railway’s main line to Banbury. It had just passed Woodstock Road Station (later renamed Kidlington) when a piece of the metal tyre of the coach behind the locomotive came away, pulling the coach off the rails, although it stayed more-or-less upright. The train was double-headed, and when the drivers realised there was something amiss they made an emergency brake application. This slowed the train so drastically that couplings broke and nine carriages not only left the rails but tumbled down the embankment, piling up on either side of the frozen Oxford Canal, which the railway crossed at this point, close to the hamlet of Shipton-on-Cherwell. Thirty-four passengers died and nearly seventy received serious injuries.

Kidlington is a kind of outer-Oxford suburb, less than a mile from the scene of the accident. Back in the 1970s a perfectly ordinary-looking house in Kidlington was the scene of many inexplicable phenomena. These included activities often associated with the presence of a poltergeist, such as lights going on and off apparently of their own accord, doors opening and shutting likewise and sounds from unoccupied rooms – unoccupied that is by living people. Strong smells of burning were evident on occasions. Where they came from was a total mystery. The owner had a number of night-time visitations from what he took to be the ghost of a lady in black, dressed smartly but in the fashion of a much earlier generation. This apparition had a very sorrowful expression, but the owner did not find her appearance threatening so much as puzzling. A neighbour once saw a group of four people in old-fashioned clothes making their way up the front garden path only to vanish before they got to the front door.

The accident was featured in an article in the Illustrated London News for January 1875 which contained a drawing of the scene in a local building where the bodies had been taken for identification purposes. A woman is shown almost prostrate with grief as she picks out her young son as being among the dead. When shown the article, the owner of the house immediately recognised the face of the woman as being that of his nocturnal visitor. The owner reckoned that the burning smell may have been a re-enactment of the fact that the coaches caught fire, while the other phenomena, especially the lady in black, were similar re-enactments of the horrors of that which took place close by in 1874.

Shipton-on-Cherwell Halt. This simple halt was close to the scene of the accident, but actually on the short branch line to Woodstock. Who said ‘bus-stop’ halts were only a thing of recent years?

This idyllic scene shows the Oxford Canal close to Shipton-on-Cherwell, the site of the railway accident.

The line from Oxford to Banbury opened in 1850 and is still operational.

SHROPSHIRE

Shrewsbury

A local man was crushed to death when part of the station roof collapsed. He returns to the scene periodically, looking as if he’s trying to work out exactly what happened.

The magnificent frontage of Shrewsbury Station. The self-confidence which this building displays contrasts sharply with the minimalist qualities of most modern railway buildings.

SOMERSET

Dunster

Dunster is the penultimate station on the lengthy branch line from Taunton to Minehead. In 1862 the West Somerset Railway opened a broad-gauge line from Norton Fitzwarren just to the west of Taunton to Watchet, providing access to what was then an important commercial port. The extension on to Minehead was built by the Minehead Railway and opened in 1874. Both lines were worked at first by the Bristol & Exeter Railway and then by the GWR. A curious anomaly was that while the Minehead Railway was absorbed into the GWR in 1897, the West Somerset retained its independence till 1922. Conversion to standard gauge took place in 1882.

Closure of the line by British Railways in 1971 was perhaps one of the more controversial decisions since the line was still handling considerable passenger traffic, especially in the summer holiday season. It reopened in sections as the West Somerset Railway and now runs through to Bishop’s Lydeard as a heritage railway. It is always handy for a preserved railway line to have a ghost – it’s good for business – and the West Somerset has one at Dunster. It lurks in the old goods shed and seems to consist of a dark shadow which moves around in the gloomy recesses of the furthest corners of the building in such a manner as to appear very threatening and sinister. It is thought to be the ghost of a railwayman who met with a fatal accident in the shed about seventy years ago.

Stogumber

Sir Francis Drake (c.1540–96) is either a swashbuckling heroic mariner or a pitiless pirate, depending largely on whether you come from England or Spain. He was of humble parentage but already a national hero by the time he was wooing Elizabeth Sydenham. However, her aristocratic and snobbish parents looked down on him as being of low birth and forbade the marriage. Drake forlornly went back to sea, consoling himself with more plunder, pillage and perhaps even a spot of rapine. Elizabeth gritted her teeth and prepared for her marriage to a bridegroom chosen by her parents on account of his excellent pedigree. The legend has it that the guests were assembling in Stogumber Church for the ceremony, but as the bridal party were entering the building there was a sudden flash of lightning and a sonorous clap of thunder followed by a huge cannonball falling from the sky and rolling up to the bride’s feet. Naturally she took this as evidence that her true love had found out about the imminent marriage and had fired this shot from halfway across the world, as a shot across the bows, expressive of his outrage. Equally naturally, she then defied her parents, frustrated the guests and confounded the would-be bridegroom by refusing to continue with the ceremony. It’s easy to guess the rest. Drake, of course, returned, they married and lived happily ever after. A nearby stately home exhibits a meteorite the size of a football which is claimed to have been the ‘cannonball’ which upset the applecart as it were. This story has more than a hint of the apocryphal about it.

Sir Francis Drake in a heroic pose. The Spanish didn’t think he was a hero; they thought he was in league with the Devil, or even the Devil himself.

Stogumber is an intermediate station on the West Somerset Railway.

Watchet

As far as the authors are aware there are no stories of railway ghosts at Watchet, but there is a harbour which is still used by small commercial craft and through which iron ore mined in the Brendon Hills was despatched in large quantities to South Wales during the Industrial Revolution. It was around the harbour that Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) almost certainly met the gnarled old sea dog who provided the inspiration for his extraordinary long poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge spent some years living close by at Nether Stowey. The poem has a powerful nightmare quality about it, and some of it at least is thought to have been written while Coleridge was under the influence of opium, a state with which he became increasingly associated. It is in this work that he gave us the following memorable lines, so apposite for a book concerning ghosts: 

Like one, that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows, a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread. 

Watchet Harbour. It is hard to visualise this ever having been a small but busy commercial port.

Statue of the Ancient Mariner. This statue at Watchet was unveiled in 2003 in memory of Coleridge and his poem of the supernatural.

SOUTH YORKSHIRE

Beighton

Beighton is on the eastern extremity of Sheffield and had a station on the northern end of what eventually became the Great Central Railway’s line towards Chesterfield, Nottingham, Leicester and London Marylebone. One day back in the 1960s two off-duty railwaymen were walking along the platform of the station, which had been closed in 1954. It was the middle of the day and the two men were chatting about this and that when the hand-lamp one of them was carrying was suddenly pulled out of his grip by an invisible hand and thrown to land some distance away with a crash. Both men were puzzled, and the one who had been holding the lamp was shocked enough by this sudden violence to be quite badly shaken up. He moved to retrieve the lamp, and had only just picked it up when once again it was invisibly snatched away and hurled once more, a bit further this time. Not stopping to recover the lamp on this occasion, they simply legged it away as fast as they could move. They had seen nothing and had no explanation for this strange episode. Was it a ghost with a mean streak? Was there a poltergeist around? Nothing similar has ever been reported from the vicinity.

The line past the old station at Beighton is still operational.

A lady in white clothing looking like that of the Edwardian era has been seen from time to time, but she fades away if approached. Elsecar is served by trains running between Sheffield and Leeds.

Hexthorpe near Doncaster

Hexthorpe lies at the centre of what used to be a complex web of railway lines on the approaches to Doncaster from the south-west. It was on the Sheffield to Doncaster and Grimsby line of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway (later the Great Central), and opened in 1849. It was the scene of a horrific accident in 1887. The driver of a MS&L Liverpool to Hull express overran signals and crashed into the rear of a special train to the Doncaster races, which was standing in Hexthorpe ticket platform. Twenty-five people were killed. Ninety-four people were seriously injured.

As so often happens with serious railway accidents, the subsequent inquiry unearthed a farrago of misunderstanding, incompetence, carelessness and outdated working equipment and practices. First impressions were that the driver and fireman of the Hull express were to blame, and they were arrested and charged with manslaughter. The trial at York Assizes aroused great interest across the nation. It was long-drawn-out, but the jury returned a verdict of ‘not guilty’. The MS&L was strongly criticised in the Board of Trade inquiry for slapdash signalling arrangements and for persisting with the use of vacuum brakes rather than automatic continuous brakes on passenger trains.

The response of the company’s employees to the accident was in direct contrast to that of its chairman. The employees offered to forgo a day’s wages to help the company defray the costs of the accident. The chairman, Sir Edward Watkin, one of most ruthless and ambitious railway magnates of the nineteenth century, arrogantly argued in favour of the continued use of the vacuum brake despite the fact that the inquiry specifically stated that had the MS&L express been equipped with automatic brakes the accident could have been avoided. With the quite extraordinary effrontery for which Watkin was notorious, he then made a statement expressing his regret that the driver and fireman had been exonerated.

Immediately after the accident the Hexthorpe area gained a reputation for being haunted by ghosts of some of the victims of the disaster, and even by a re-enactment of the crash. There is a theory that the concentration of emotion released by such events can imbue the locality with an energy that leads to such re-enactments. This energy is thought sometimes to dissipate over time, and there have been no reports of such activity for many years.

In the 1970s, however, a number of railway workers reported seeing a mysterious figure described as a man in a light-coloured raincoat moving about some sidings in the vicinity of Hexthorpe. The apparition sometimes passed uncomfortably close to moving locomotives and wagons, causing worry for the railwaymen, but when they challenged him, he simply vanished. Inevitably those who saw the figure were left wondering if they had been seeing things, but sightings were so persistent that the feeling developed that there was indeed a ghost at Hexthorpe. A few hoaxers and pranksters got in on the act to confuse the issue. A goods guard, however, was left in no doubt that he had seen the Hexthorpe ghost. He was sitting in his brake-van at the rear of a goods train waiting for clearance from the sidings when a man in a light-coloured raincoat opened the rear door, walked passed him and then vanished through the closed front door of the van.

Was this the ghost of one of the victims of the Hexthorpe crash who had purloined a raincoat to keep himself warm on cold nights, or is there some other explanation for the apparition?

The line from Sheffield to Doncaster is still operational through Hexthorpe.

The Hexthorpe Disaster. As usual, a chapter of misunderstandings, negligence and penny-pinching led to this accident.

SUFFOLK

Bury St Edmunds

The first railway line to Bury St Edmunds was from Ipswich and opened in 1846. In 1854 a connection was completed to Newmarket whence there was already a line to Cambridge. In 1879 a curve at Chippenham allowed through-running of trains from Bury to Ely. South from Bury went a rural branch line to Long Melford, opened in 1865, while northwards was an even more rustic branch to Thetford, completed in 1876. All these lines eventually came under the ownership of the Great Eastern Railway and obviously meant that Bury became a railway junction of some importance.

Bury St Edmunds. This station was opened by the Eastern Union Railway in 1847. It was a very impressive station for a relatively small town, and once had an overall roof.

As a town and regional centre, Bury was perhaps more important than its mere population figures in the nineteenth century would suggest. The standing in which the railway authorities held Bury is surely indicated by its station. This was opened by the Eastern Union Railway in 1847, replacing a temporary station close by. It probably looked more impressive externally than from the platforms, but it was a grandiose station by any standards. It was built in red brick with stone dressings and the eastern end of the platforms sport a pair of extraordinary Baroque domed towers. It formerly had an overall roof and its façade is an eclectic mix of Tudor with a dash of the Dutch. It is now too large for the traffic it handles, and for much of the time looks somewhat forlorn. Something of a ghost station, perhaps?

Bury Station is a listed structure, as is the adjacent Station Bridge, an underbridge at the east end of the station. This bridge is supposedly haunted. For over 130 years there have been occasional reports of sightings of ‘an old-fashioned soldier’ in the vicinity. The story goes that this is the ghost of a veteran of the Crimean War who was seriously injured and brought back to be looked after in a hospital in the Bury area. Presumably he made a full recovery because, sound in wind, limb and all the other relevant parts, he met and fell in love with a local nurse. A passionate romance ensued. The father made it known that he disapproved, believing that soldiers had a girl in every port, as it were, and were a bad lot. The couple decided to elope, but her father found out about their plans and he went looking for the soldier. He caught up with him by the railway bridge near Bury Station and shot and killed him.

Trains still run on the Cambridge to Ipswich and the Peterborough and Ely to Ipswich lines.

Felixstowe

Passenger trains first ran to Felixstowe from Westerfield on 1 May 1877, operated by the Felixstowe Railway & Pier Co. of 1875 which was controlled by the local big-shot, Colonel George Tomline. He was the largest landowner in the district and a man of forceful if eccentric personality who wanted to develop Felixstowe as a port to rival nearby Harwich. In 1879 the Great Eastern Railway took over the operation of the line and some trains were extended to and from Ipswich. Tomline’s company was then renamed the Felixstowe Dock & Railway Co. and obtained parliamentary authority to build a dock basin. This was not very successful, but, rather unexpectedly and not entirely to Tomline’s approval, Felixstowe began to develop into a fashionable seaside watering place. In 1887 the GER bought the railway and in 1898 opened the town station, which was well situated for serving the holiday and residential town that was developing on the cliff top away from the two existing stations called Felixstowe Beach and Pier respectively.

It was on the approach to the town station that many people used to witness what they believed was the ghost of a young girl who had been run over by a train at this point. This spook has not been seen for many years.

This is the rather sad remnant of a well-built four-platform station in Felixstowe, but at least it is still open. The ghostly manifestation is said to have occurred close to the bridge in the distance.

Tomline would be a happy man were he alive today. His port has expanded into a major container depot and base for ferries to Zeebrugge.

Sudbury

In British Railways days the rather pompous term ‘motive power depot’ was created to replace the more informal ‘engine shed’. ‘Shed’ is most certainly an appropriate word to describe the motive power depot at Sudbury. By any standards the Great Eastern Railway Co. was an impecunious concern with little money to spare for infrastructure, but there are garden sheds that would have put its engine shed at Sudbury to shame.

In 1846 the grandly titled Colchester, Stour Valley, Sudbury & Halstead Railway Co. was incorporated, the main purpose of which was to build a line twelve miles long from the main line of the Eastern Counties Railway at Marks Tey to the prosperous little town of Sudbury. This line opened in 1849. In 1865 it was extended beyond Sudbury to Long Melford where it bifurcated with one branch heading westward to Haverhill and another northward to Bury St Edmunds. These lines were all absorbed by the Great Eastern in 1898.

When this extension was made, a new through station was built and the old terminus was converted into a goods depot. It was on the edge of this goods yard that a small engine shed was erected, perhaps large enough to accommodate two small locomotives under cover. This mean little building was well away from the new station and stood amidst a collection of other shanties which housed the varied freight services provided by the railway for the needs of Sudbury and district. None of these was occupied at night when the branch line closed down, but a man was required to be on duty in the shed and ensure that its locomotives were ready for activity in the morning. This meant that although the man had plenty of work to do on the shift servicing the locomotives, his was a lonely post. He would have been well aware that thieves often found railway sidings and depots a tempting target for their depredations. Contrary to current received wisdom, the ‘good old days’ never really existed, and even small towns like Sudbury had their criminal fraternities in the nineteenth century, and theft supported by violence was by no means uncommon.

We do not know what went through the mind of the shedman during his nocturnal vigil, but he would only have been human to feel a sense of loneliness and vulnerability. Is it worse to be threatened by a living entity or a dead one, perhaps a ghost? One night in 1923 the man had done all the work that needed doing and was relaxing over a mug of steaming tea in the little room that constituted the office and mess. It was about an hour before any of the drivers or firemen were due to sign in and not too long before his shift would finish. Suddenly, only yards away because the shed was so small, he heard the sound of coal being shovelled from a bunker or tender fall-plate, just as it would sound if a fireman was feeding an engine’s firebox. He picked up a lamp and rushed outside, but the moment he did so the sound stopped. He examined both the engines under his care but there was nothing to be seen and so, puzzled, he went back to the office. No sooner had he resumed his seat when the shovelling sound started again. Once more he rushed out – nothing there! Now simply irked rather than puzzled, he had another look round, more thoroughly this time, and then went back to the mess. Three more times the sound reoccurred and then stopped abruptly the minute he opened the door into the shed. After the fifth time the man was a trembling wreck. Gone was any desire to find out what was causing the noise; all he wanted to do was to run away to home and hearth. He knew that if he did he would be dismissed from his post. Fortunately it seemed as if the fifth bout of shovelling had been the last, and he waited patiently, but only partially recovered from the shock, for the first of his colleagues to report in. He resolved to put a brave face on it and not tell any of them of his experience.

It was with a sense of understandable trepidation that he made his way to work the next evening. He knew that he had heard something the previous night. He could have handled the situation had it simply been some stupid prankster. He would have given him a hiding he would never forget. The trouble was that he knew that anyone playing tricks would have given themselves away. He just couldn’t reconcile himself to the idea that somebody in Sudbury was stupid enough to walk through the town in the early hours of the morning, trespass on railway property and enter the tiny darkened shed, climb onto a footplate and then simulate the actions of a locomotive fireman, and do so without being discovered. It was too absurd even to contemplate. The problem was that the alternative was worse. Could it have been a ghost? But ghosts were just something you read about in books. Nobody thought they actually existed, or so his rational side argued.

As the last of his colleagues mounted his bike and cycled off into the night, the man realised that he had never felt lonelier. What would he do if the dreaded shovelling started up again? His routine jobs kept him busy for a while. There was some paperwork to do and a few simple pieces of maintenance on the two engines present that night. As usual this work took a couple of hours or more, and he then retired to the mess for a mug of tea poured out from a vast black and somewhat soot-encrusted kettle. Try as he might, he couldn’t keep his hand steady as he held the mug and glanced up at the clock. It was almost exactly twenty-four hours since he had heard the mysterious sounds of shovelling. He felt a gnawing in the pit of his stomach as he strained to hear the repetition that he so dreaded. The minutes ticked by in an awful suspense. Five…ten…fifteen. The mess room was hot and the man dozed off. He woke with a jolt – he must have been asleep for an hour. He had a few more chores to do and then he heard a cheerful whistle as the first of his mates arrived for work.

He never heard the sound again nor did he mention it to anyone for years, but then one evening in the pub he and a group of railwaymen were telling yarns. He’d had a pint more than usual and was feeling somewhat garrulous – he only had a few weeks to go before retirement. What he related didn’t even raise an eyebrow. Two of the men said that they had heard the same noise but also hadn’t mentioned it for fear that they would be thought of as moonstruck. Gossip got around fast in a little town like Sudbury. Another man said that fifty or more years ago a fireman at the shed was the victim of unrequited love and had become so despondent that he had hanged himself nearby. Was it the ghost of this lovelorn man that returned every so often to shovel coal in the witching hours?

The shed was taken down around 1950 – a good shove would probably have done the job – and after that the locomotives stood in the open. Diesels replaced steam and, perhaps surprisingly, the branch line from Marks Tey as far as Sudbury remains operational.

SUSSEX

Balcombe Tunnel

Such was the significance of Brighton in the social and fashionable life of the so-called great and good of Britain that a line between that town and London featured strongly in the list of early railway projects. In fact in 1835 no fewer than six schemes to join them were being considered. In 1837 the London & Brighton Railway received parliamentary authorisation. The first sod was cut on 12 July 1838 and the line opened in September 1841.

The terrain meant this was a heavily engineered line, striking against the grain of the Weald and penetrating the heart of the Downs to reach Brighton. Nowhere is this civil engineering more evident than in the vicinity of Balcombe between Three Bridges and Haywards Heath.

Balcombe Tunnel is 800 yards long, and has long been regarded as haunted. In the first instance it is said that during the First World War three soldiers took shelter in the tunnel during a bombing raid, presumably by a Zeppelin. They may have got away from the bombs but were knocked down and killed by a train instead. Others say that they took shelter during a storm. History repeated itself as tragedy during the Second World War when once again the tunnel was used as a shelter, perhaps during a bombing raid. This time two soldiers entered the tunnel, and they also died courtesy of a fast-moving electric train. So a total of five soldiers breathed their last in Balcombe Tunnel, and there have been many reports that their ghosts have been seen, but as is the way with many ghosts, they simply fade away if any attempt is made to approach them.

Just south of the tunnel is the Balcombe or Ouse Valley Viaduct. This is a claimant for the title of most elegant viaduct in Britain, and its fine lines are evidence of how the early railway builders were successful in combining engineering and art to enhance rather than intrude on the landscape. The viaduct is 492 yards long. It is built of red brick and Caen stone and all the materials were brought to the site by barge up the River Ouse, which was then navigable almost as far as Haywards Heath. The line over the viaduct and through the tunnel is still operational.

Clayton Tunnel

Clayton Tunnel is one mile and 499 yards in length and burrows under the South Downs on the London to Brighton main line of the former London, Brighton & South Coast Railway between Hassocks and Preston Park, just north of Brighton. On Sunday 25 August 1861 it was the scene of an appalling accident, the worst up to that time that had occurred anywhere on Britain’s railways. This tunnel is on the same line as that at Balcombe and opened for traffic in 1841.

Early signalling and safety arrangements on the railways strike the modern observer as being rather haphazard or even verging on the slap-happy. The idea of despatching trains on a busy line on the basis of a short time interval seems fraught with obvious dangers. However, there was a justifiable dread of an accident occurring in a tunnel and it was for this reason that the LB&SC had installed a primitive block system worked by electric telegraph in the tunnel. It was the very first such installation on any of Britain’s railways. Its inadequacies, other failed equipment and human error were responsible for the horrific crash.

Balcombe Station on the London to Brighton line. This tunnel is just to the north of the station and, close by, to the south, is the magnificent Balcombe or Ouse Viaduct.

In the enquiry following the accident a farrago of bad practices was unearthed. Not the least of these was that the signalman in Clayton Tunnel south signal box was working a twenty-four-hour shift on that day. This was to allow him to have one full day per week away from work, but it may have accounted for his rather slow responses once things started going wrong; he was simply over-tired. Three trains were scheduled in close succession on the northbound line through the tunnel. They were an excursion from Portsmouth consisting of sixteen coaches, an excursion of seventeen coaches from Brighton and a normal scheduled train of twelve coaches. It was the usual practice on this line for trains to be despatched at intervals of five minutes. The enquiry into what subsequently happened showed that the three trains had actually been booked away from Brighton with three-and-four-minute intervals between them, although the train register had falsely recorded five and nine minutes respectively.

Clayton Tunnel is odd because it has one plain portal, the other being this extraordinary romantic castellated entrance. The small building peeping coyly over the parapet was originally the tunnel-keeper’s cottage.

In simple terms what happened was that the signalman in Clayton Tunnel south box was unable to ascertain from his colleague in the north box at the far end of the tunnel whether the first train had passed through. At the very last minute he showed a red flag to the following train, which was seen by the engine’s crew who braked and came to a halt in the tunnel and then, and this seems absolutely extraordinary, began to reverse slowly to check with the signalman what he had meant by flagging them. It was while the second train was backing that it was hit by the third train. On impact, the engine of this train reared up, its chimney hitting the roof of the tunnel, red hot coals going in all directions and scalding steam being released under high pressure. Twenty-three passengers died and 176 others were seriously injured.

The improvement of railway safety has been cumulative and the enquiry into this accident was one of the factors leading to the adoption of block rather than time-interval signalling throughout those parts of Britain’s railway system used by passenger trains, and also compulsory continuous brake systems on passenger trains.

Since 1861 there have been sporadic reports from men maintaining the track inside the tunnel of the horrifying sounds of crashing and crunching metal, the release of high-pressure steam and screams of agony. These have been put down to a ghostly re-enactment of the horrors of that dreadful August day in 1861.

Clayton Tunnel is odd because it was built with a plain portal at its southern end and a highly eccentric north end designed to look like a medieval castle gateway. The strange sight this offers is only accentuated by the fact that a little brick cottage peers incongruously and a little self-consciously over the parapet. When it first opened, Clayton Tunnel was lit by gas and it is thought that this cottage may have housed the man who looked after this lighting.

So odd is the effect created by the castle and the cottage that the northern entrance to Clayton Tunnel often features in books on architectural follies and foibles.

West Hoathly

In 1882 the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway opened a line from East Grinstead through Horsted Keynes to Culver Junction where it met the same company’s line from Tunbridge Wells, Eridge and Uckfield to Lewes. The new line was a scenic route and gained the nickname of the ‘Bluebell Line’. It was also a solidly engineered line built in anticipation of a level of traffic which was never realised. It did not help that several of the stations were a considerable distance from the places they purported to serve. The high hopes for the traffic that would develop were indicated by provision being made for double track on the section south from Horsted Keynes to Culver Junction. The second track was never required although there were passing loops at stations.

In the early 1960s a man was having a quiet holiday pottering around in this delightful part of Sussex. Being interested in railways, he thought he would go and wallow in a bit of pleasant nostalgia tinged with melancholy by visiting the closed ‘Bluebell Line’, parts of which were in the process of being dismantled. He parked up near West Hoathly Station and decided to have a look at Sharpthorne Tunnel, which was 731 yards in length. It was Saturday afternoon and the demolition contractors had left the site for the weekend. He walked along the formation where the track had been and came up to the tunnel entrance. He was able to see a circle of bright sunlight at the far end. He rather wanted to walk this abandoned tunnel before it was bricked up, and he thought it would only take him about fifteen minutes. He plunged into the darkness eagerly, realising that he was doing something that not many other people would ever do. Some though, he acknowledged, might not have had any wish to do such a thing.

It was surprisingly dark within the tunnel but, although the rails had been ripped up, the ballast was still in place and his feet, which he was unable to see, made a reassuring crunching sound as he stumbled along. Other sounds intruded on his senses. One was the drip-drip of water falling from the tunnel roof in many places; another was his own unnaturally laboured breathing. He realised that this tunnel had ‘atmosphere’. He quickly decided that it was an atmosphere that he didn’t like, but he pressed on despite increasingly having qualms about the whole venture. It was a bit late to be having second thoughts. The tunnel end he was making for provided a welcoming circle of sunlight, although it didn’t seem to be getting any closer. Suddenly a figure was silhouetted against the sunlight. Something a little distance ahead pranced across his line of vision and then disappeared noiselessly. He wasn’t quite sure whether it was a human figure – it had moved so swiftly – but on the whole he thought it must have been. He dared not think about what other kind of creature might be lurking in an abandoned railway tunnel.

He stood petrified and rooted to the spot, the steady drip-drip of water and his breathing now being drowned out by another noise: the stentorian beating of his own heart! He had the horrid feeling that whatever he had seen was hiding in wait for him. Perhaps it was eyeing him up at this very moment from one of the little refuges or recesses in the tunnel walls that the platelayers and gangers sheltered in when trains passed. Desperately he looked around him, realising that he was only just about half-way through the tunnel. He was afraid to advance, but the idea of beating a retreat with this thing perhaps dogging his footsteps was equally repugnant. With a superhuman effort he decided to continue but when he tried to put one foot in front of the other, he couldn’t move. It was as if he had hit an invisible barrier.

He was scared witless but he made himself turn round and head back the way he had come, albeit looking back nervously over his shoulder every few seconds as he did so. Then he stopped, seeing or sensing nothing untoward. He had had a very bad fright but what had he actually seen? Could it just have been some prankster who at this very moment was chortling away to himself and would undoubtedly be telling his mates down the pub that night how he’d scared away this stupid bloke walking through the old tunnel?

It took much effort on his part but he decided that no local yokel was going to get the better of him in this way, so he reversed direction to head for the far end of the tunnel once more. He had taken no more than a couple of steps when he again experienced the sense of walking into an invisible and immovable barrier. That was too much. He turned round yet again and ran in a blind panic towards the original end of the tunnel. His legs seemed like lead, but this time he dared not look back. What a glorious relief to stumble out into the warmth of a lovely English summer’s day full of birdsong.

Covered in a cold sweat, he sat down on a wall to try to regain his composure. The contrast between the reassuring and familiar sights and sounds of the countryside and the sensations in the tunnel could not have been starker. He made a resolution never to walk through an abandoned railway tunnel again. He had had a bad scare and recalling the experience in later years always brought him out in goose pimples. He told a few people about his adventure and learned that the tunnel did have a sinister reputation, local gossip being that it was haunted perhaps by someone who had gone into it for a dare and then been killed by a train. Was it the ghost of this unlucky or just stupid trespasser that the man saw in Sharpthorne Tunnel that day?

Another tunnel on the line, Cinder Hill Tunnel, which is a mere 62 yards long, gained fame in the Second World War when a train used it as a shelter from a German fighter which dived down to strafe it.

The line from East Grinstead to Lewes became notorious in the 1950s. The Acts of 1877 and 1878 which authorised the building of this route specifically stated that a minimum of four trains a day in each direction had to call at Newick & Chailey, Sheffield Park and West Hoathly stations. The line lost money and British Railways Southern Region wanted to withdraw passenger services. The normal procedures were observed and the line was scheduled to lose its passenger services in June 1955, but in the event they ceased earlier due to a national strike by footplatemen. A zealous local resident then informed British Railways that the closure of the three stations was illegal and that the service would have to be restored. This the Southern Region did with extraordinary ill grace. Services were restored running between East Grinstead and Lewes but calling only at these three stations and omitting Barcombe, which was the only one which generated significant traffic! Not only that but the trains ran at the most inconvenient times possible and consisted of some of the most ramshackle coaches in use anywhere in the country. This ridiculous service of what might almost be described as ‘ghost trains’ ended when British Railways managed to have the original Acts repealed. The locals mockingly called it ‘the sulky service’.

In 1908 the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway was reorganising its engineering works at Brighton. Sidings at Horsted Keynes took on the appearance of an elephants’ graveyard as an antediluvian selection of the company’s locomotives was stored there. Most of them were superannuated engines that would be called in for scrapping once the works resumed its normal activity. There is something extremely ghostly about the sight of the inert, rusting hulks of steam locomotives stored out of use in this way. No wonder that a locomotive not in steam is called a ‘dead engine’.

The ‘Bluebell Line’ in due course became the ‘Bluebell Railway’, a very successful steam-operated heritage line. It started operations in 1960 and has gone from strength to strength. Work is now (December 2008) well advanced in reopening the northern section to East Grinstead, which means that trains will soon be running once more through Sharpthorne Tunnel. This tunnel is the longest on any of the UK’s preserved railway lines.

In the 1960s several hundred steam locomotives gathered in sidings at Barry Docks awaiting scrapping. Some were there for years, silently rusting away. A ‘dead’ locomotive is one not in steam, and there are dead engines as far as the eye can see. Now do you believe in railway ghosts?

WEST MIDLANDS

Coventry

The first regular trains through Coventry ran on the Rugby to Birmingham section of the London & Birmingham Railway in 1838. Later on all the lines that served the city came under the control of the London & North Western Railway. This company therefore enjoyed a virtual monopoly of Coventry although they had been forced grudgingly to accept the arch-rival Midland Railway having running powers over the line from Nuneaton.

The busy Warwick Road runs on a large bridge over the western end of Coventry Station, and round this area there used to be extensive sidings and associated goods sheds, offices and other buildings. One of the buildings in this area had the reputation of being haunted. After being sold out of railway use, this building found new life as a recording studio, and it was reckoned to contain not just one but two ghosts. One was the spirit of a railwayman who has the habit of turning lights on and off unwontedly, and opening and closing doors and windows, casting a rather frightening shadow of a man’s head and also invisibly brushing past staff and visitors to the studio. There is no actual evidence of who he was, but his presence in this particular building has led to the suggestion that he must have been a railwayman. The second ghost is that of a young man associated with the recording studio who died as the result of injudiciously mixing drink and drugs. This ghost was thought to tamper with the sophisticated electrical equipment in the studio with the result that very odd extraneous noises would be heard on some recordings. Between them the two ghosts were able on occasion to produce a distinctly unpleasant atmosphere, and several eminent figures from the world of pop music have commented that they do not like working in the studio because they have felt threatened by a presence or, should we say, two presences.

Coventry Station looking northwards. The Warwick Road Bridge crosses the end of the station in the distance.

WEST YORKSHIRE

Clayton

The Midland, the Lancashire & Yorkshire and the Great Northern railway companies were deadly rivals in parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire, never more so than in the area to the west of Bradford towards Halifax and Keighley. When one company sought parliamentary approval for a line, one or other of its rivals would immediately set about planning a line of their own in the vicinity. This meant, for example, that there were two rival routes between Bradford and Halifax and Bradford and Keighley, admittedly serving different intermediate places.

The Great Northern did not have the pick of the routes joining Bradford to these other important towns because the Lancashire & Yorkshire already had a route via Low Moor to Halifax and the Midland had a line to Keighley via Shipley and Bingley. The very high ground to the west of Bradford around Queensbury (over 1,100ft above sea level) did not attract much in the way of interest from early railway promoters until the Bradford & Thornton Railway Co. was incorporated in 1871 and absorbed by the Great Northern in the following year. A line had already been built from Halifax to Ovenden and the Great Northern decided to extend this line to Queensbury to connect with the line from Bradford. At the same time as thereby gaining access to Halifax, the Great Northern announced its intention of building a line from Queensbury to Keighley. The lines concerned opened in sections between 1878 and 1884, quite late in the day for new railway construction.

These schemes had as much to do with railway imperialism as they did with serious commercial considerations. To this day much of the territory which these lines penetrated remains predominantly rural. The lines which converged on Queensbury were immensely expensive to construct, with several tunnels, numerous massive viaducts and such fearsome gradients that the Great Northern footplatemen called this part of the line from Bradford to Holmfield ‘the Alpine Route’. No expense was spared in the building of these lines, and yet there was little hope of generating much intermediate business. At the more urbanised Bradford and Halifax ends of the lines, the introduction of electric trams soon leached away much of the local traffic. The Queensbury lines cost almost £1 million to build and can never have repaid the initial investment. Normal passenger services were withdrawn in 1955 and the lines west of Horton Park were closed completely by 1965, with a stub surviving for freight purposes at the eastern end of the line until 1972.

In the late 1940s a young man who lived in Clayton used to catch the train to Great Horton where he worked in a mill. One freezing cold and clear moonlit night he stood on the platform at Great Horton after work waiting for the local train to take him back to Clayton and his dinner and a roaring fire. The train heaved itself up the gradient into the station, dead on time. As usual it was hauled by one of the sturdy little Ivatt 0-6-2 tank engines and consisted, as always, of two rather ancient compartment carriages. He chose an empty compartment and climbed in to the reassuringly familiar dusty and well-worn surroundings made comparatively cosy with their steam-heating. At least it was a lot warmer than standing on the platform.

With a pop in its whistle, the engine set off climbing hard to Clayton, the next station along the line. As the train entered a deep cutting, the hitherto warm and welcoming compartment suddenly became freezing cold and, to his horror, the young man looked up to see a woman’s face pressed against the outside of the window. And what a face! It was twisted into a grimace of pain and terror which itself managed to be utterly terrifying. He sank back into his seat, his own face a mask of shock and fear. Thankfully the face at the window vanished just before the train staggered into Clayton Station. Shaking like an aspen, the young man leapt out of the compartment and almost fell into the arms of a porter on the platform. As a regular traveller, he was on first name terms with the man.

There was something comforting both in the solid feel of the station buildings and in the solid appearance and demeanour of the porter to whom the frightened young man gasped out his story. The porter calmed him down and told him that he had seen the ghost of ‘Fair Becca’. It transpired that the young man was only the latest of many travellers on the line who in the hours of darkness had had a similar experience. Becca was a married woman who, many years previously, had enjoyed an extra-marital affair which her husband had found out about. Having an insanely jealous nature, he was not the sort to sit down and talk it through. He told her he was going to kill her, and that’s precisely what he did. Left with the perennial problem of all murderers, that of disposing of the body, he didn’t use much thought and simply dumped it down a well where it was only a matter of time before it was discovered. Fair Becca’s ghost haunted the stretch of line between Great Horton and Clayton, close to the place where she was murdered.

Haworth

Haworth, famous for its associations with the extraordinary literary Bronte sisters, and Branwell, their boozy brother, was a station on the branch line from Keighley to Oxenhope. This line climbed steeply from the northern terminus at Keighley following the River Worth, and the company under whose auspices it was built was not unnaturally called the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway. It opened in 1867 and was taken over by the giant Midland Railway in 1881. That company had operated the trains right from the start.

In fact the line had an inauspicious history even before it opened. A cow is said to have eaten the engineering plans related to the line. Presumably they were the only copy because the start of construction work was delayed. The building of the short Ingrow Tunnel undermined a newly built Methodist chapel which collapsed leaving the railway company having to pay compensation. Shortly before the line was due to open great storms caused the Worth to go into spate and wash away a bridge near Damems. On the rearranged day for the line’s opening, the inaugural train had to have two goes at climbing the 1 in 58 out of Keighley. It was completely defeated by the gradient between Oakworth and Haworth and the only option was to split the train in two. Happily both portions managed to make it to Oxenhope, but a legend of unintentional and understated comedy had already been created which the line found it easy to live up to.

The old goods yard at Haworth houses much of the rolling stock and equipment for the preserved Worth Valley Railway, and the vicinity has gained the reputation of being haunted by the ghost of a man with the strange name of Binns Bancroft. He was a coal merchant who ran his business from the railway yard at Haworth in the late nineteenth century. He seems to have been a busybody because he insisted on supervising the shunting operations when the pick-up goods train arrived to drop off wagons of coal for him. Despite not being a railway employee he often actually undertook the quite hazardous job of using a shunting pole to unhook moving wagons, and he dashed about the sidings issuing instructions to the men on the engine and to the guard. They regarded him as a perishing nuisance. His zeal eventually got the better of him and he died after being crushed between two wagons. This was in 1882. The verdict at his inquest was ‘death by misadventure’.

Some people reckon that Binns Bancroft’s body may have been buried but his soul goes marching on. The figure of a man has been seen in and around the yard, sometimes with a shunting pole in his hand and gesticulating as if he was perhaps directing shunting operations. Many people claim to have seen a figure answering this description, but any attempts to approach him merely cause him to fade away. Items have been moved around in the yard at times when the public have been excluded and when none of the volunteers have been around. They have sometimes been hidden away and it has been the Devil’s own work to find them again. It seems that Binns Bancroft is as capable of being a nuisance dead as when he was alive.

As with so many branch lines, the Keighley & Worth Valley enjoyed its best years in the 1930s. Cuts were made in services during the Second World War and again in the 1950s, but an enhanced service operated by diesel multiple units was introduced in 1960, by which time closure of the line had already been threatened. Earlier economies had included the use of a three-coach gangwayed set of carriages which enabled the guard to issue tickets on the train. The regular guard was a man of splenetic and misanthropic character whose ticket machine enabled him to issue tickets for a range of destinations beyond the branch line itself, but for reasons of his own he preferred not to do so. On one occasion a woman passenger asked him for a return to Bingley, not very far away on the line between Keighley and Leeds. He grumbled that he did not know the fare and would have to return to the guard’s van to consult his faretable. She stuck to her guns, he went off and returned audibly griping about the inconvenience to which he was being put. The ticket was sold and money changed hands but he told her next time she wanted to do the trip to Bingley and back, she should go by bus.

Passenger services were withdrawn in 1961 and freight followed within a few years. However, the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway Preservation Society had been established and they bought the line, restoring services and its Victorian atmosphere, and creating a successful tourist attraction.

Damems is a stopping place on what is now known as the Worth Valley Railway. It has a short platform and the station building was so small that local legend said that a nearby farmer once requisitioned it for use as a hen hut. Damems was widely regarded as the smallest station in the mighty and widespread empire operated by the Midland Railway. A ghostlike figure wearing the uniform of a railwayman has been seen in the vicinity on a number of occasions.

The Worth Valley Railway is quite a place for the aficionado of the supernatural. One of the features of the line which juvenile passengers in particular love is Ingrow Tunnel. How is one to explain the sight of smoke, having the appearance and smell of that produced by a steam locomotive, pouring out of the entrance of the tunnel? This phenomenon would be entirely understandable if a steam-hauled train had just passed through but makes absolutely no sense when it occurs on days when none of the locomotives are steam-driven.

Huddersfield

Huddersfield is a product of the Industrial Revolution and its early prominence in the use of steam power in the woollen industry meant that a canal was built linking the Calder-Hebble navigation to Lancashire through the heart of the Pennines. Traffic began in 1811, but the Huddersfield Narrow Canal suffered because the nature of the terrain it passed through which limited its size. By the 1820s there were calls to build a railway to replace it. However, in the speculative binge that established so many railways in the 1830s, Huddersfield missed out and the town was not really on the railway map until 1847. However, the station which was eventually built was an absolute tour de force. It was described by Sir John Betjeman as ‘the most splendid station façade in England’, and he went on to liken it to an enormous classical country house. It became an important centre of operations for the Lancashire & Yorkshire and London & North Western railway companies. It is still busy.

This station, which is better outside than in, was haunted by the ghost of a man who worked there as a platform porter. Unfortunately he was hit by a train and received injuries which meant that he was incapacitated and had to leave the railway service. It was reckoned that he had been negligent and so he was due no compensation. When he died, probably in the direst of poverty, he apparently returned to his former workplace. For many years when anything went wrong on the premises – a derailment, a minor bump between trains or even parcels falling onto the track and being squashed under a passing train – then a vindictive, gloating laugh would be heard reverberating around under the station’s overall roof.

Otley

There are no trains today at Otley. The station opened on 1 February 1865 and closed on 20 March 1965. It was on the former Midland Railway and had been served over the years by trains between Leeds, Ilkley and Skipton, and others from Bradford to Harrogate.

A few miles to the east of Otley ran the Leeds Northern Railway which connected Leeds with Harrogate, Ripon and the north-east of England. This line was opened from Leeds to Thirsk in 1849 and eventually came under the control of the North Eastern Railway Co. The terrain between Leeds and Harrogate is extremely hilly and provided many challenges for the engineers. At Bramhope they had no option but to build a long tunnel, two miles and 241 yards long, to be exact, piercing the watershed between Airedale and Wharfdale. 2,300 men and 400 horses were employed on the works which took four years to be completed. Severe difficulties included constant flooding, and the pumps had to remove no less than 1,600 million gallons of water. There was a human cost to all this. Twenty-three men lost their lives in the building of Bramhope Tunnel and countless others received serious injuries.

In the churchyard of All Saints at Otley is a remarkable monument. It was paid for by the contractor, the sub-contractors and the navvies who chipped in with a whip-round. It takes the form of a replica of the northern entrance to Bramhope Tunnel. The full-size tunnel entrance is remarkable enough, consisting of two mock-Gothic towers complete with arrow slits and battlements, and these are reproduced faithfully at both ends of the replica which stands about 6ft high with a short stretch of tunnel in between. Curiously it does not mention how many navvies were killed or the names of any of them, but it does mention the contractor James Bray and displays a number of biblical quota-tions. A cynic might conclude that it is more a monument to Bray than to the men who died doing his work. They are buried close by and for many years it was rumoured that this fenced-off bit of churchyard was haunted by their ghosts. Unfortunately, the authors have been unable to discover whether these ghosts themselves were scaled down versions of the prototype. Big or small, the ghosts were real enough to the local schoolchildren who would run past the churchyard as fast as their legs would carry them, not daring to glance towards the monument.

There was something of a craze for adorning railway tunnel mouths with features loosely derived from medieval military architecture. Many early travellers were nervous about their trains plunging into these subterranean passages. Doom and gloom merchants prophesied that tunnel roofs would collapse onto passing trains with all the passengers being crushed to death. Giving the tunnel entrance motifs from centuries-old buildings was no mere whimsy but was done to suggest permanence and thereby to allay the fears of timid passengers.

The line through Bramhope Tunnel is still operational.

Wakefield Kirkgate

The railway history of the Wakefield area is extremely complicated so suffice it to say that, of the city’s two stations, this one was under the joint ownership of the Lancashire & Yorkshire and the Great Northern railway companies. It opened for business in 1857.

The memorial in Otley to the victims of the building of Bramhope Tunnel.

The Navvies’ Memorial. Local children used to dare each other to crawl through – the ghosts of the navvies might get them!

Even the frontage of Wakefield Kirkgate Station is hardly an advert for rail travel.

Kirkgate Station, in my opinion, is an absolute disgrace. It was once an impressive and busy station with an overall roof. Many passenger trains were to be seen, there were extensive carriage and goods sidings and a real sense of bustle. Now the place is a largely empty, echoing, run-down husk which gives all the wrong impressions about travelling by rail in the twenty-first century. Such is its state of neglect that it might almost be described as a ‘ghost station’. It is certainly not the kind of place anyone would want to hang about in, and it is therefore somewhat surprising that it has a ghost who has been seen on many occasions. She takes the form of a lady in clothes of the Victorian period and, although she has been seen in various parts of the station, she seems to prefer to lurk in the dingy subway. Perhaps she is waiting for better times. It may be a long wait.

Yeadon

Yeadon is best known today for being the location of the airport serving Leeds and Bradford, but for some years it was the terminus of a now largely forgotten railway, just one and a half miles long. In the 1880s a proposal was made for a branch from Guiseley on the Leeds and Bradford to the Ilkley line of the Midland Railway to Yeadon. The company making this proposal was the Guiseley, Yeadon & Rawdon Railway, and it got delusions of grandeur that it would extend beyond Yeadon to serve other places in the West Riding. These hopes came to nothing and the short branch was taken over by the Midland Railway and opened in 1894. This curious little line never had a regular passenger service, was closed temporarily in 1944 as a wartime economy, reopened and then closed permanently in 1964.

Very occasional excursion trains ran on the Yeadon branch, and it was one of these that constituted a ghost train of sorts. The year was 1930 and the LMSR had offered a day excursion from Yeadon to Morecambe. The draw of Morecambe proved irresistible (how could it have been otherwise?) and the train was fully booked. A large crowd of well-wishers turned out to see the train off early in the morning on its scenic route via Ilkley, Skipton, Hellifield and Carnforth. A big crowd of friends, relations and others turned out eager to witness its return. After all, a passenger train at Yeadon was a rare event. The time for its arrival came and went. No one thought anything of a delay of ten minutes or perhaps half-an-hour but when an hour had passed people began to become restless and irritated. After ninety minutes a degree of concern began to spread, but people were helpless because no members of the railway staff were on hand at Yeadon. Rumours began to spread with the quite remarkable speed they often display in such situations. As always, those who knew least said most. Soon theories were circulating that there had been a derailment, a crash or some other catastrophe, and the more suggestive in the crowd began to fear for their kith and kin.

The cause of the problem was an oversight on the part of the LMSR. The line to Yeadon was heavily graded and a pilot engine was required to assist the train engine up to the terminus. They had forgotten to provide a pilot and the train had stopped at Guiseley while attempts were made to rustle up an additional engine from somewhere. These efforts were fruitless and so the harassed staff at Guiseley had little option but to ask everyone on board to alight and to walk the lanes and field paths back to home and hearth. Naturally many passengers were outraged and let their feelings be known. There were many babies on the train and they were getting fractious, as were the children who were now dogtired after a day of excitement. As usual, the managers whose incompetence was responsible for the failure to provide the pilot engine were many miles away and it was the ordinary railway workers at Guiseley who had to bear the brunt of the justifiable wrath of the frustrated excursionists. However, in dribs and drabs they set off for Yeadon on foot, grumbling as they went and swearing that they would never have anything to do with the railway in the future.

Not surprisingly, the Morecambe excursion became known locally as the ‘Ghost Train’ – the train that went but never came back.

WILTSHIRE

Box Tunnel

Box Tunnel was perhaps the major engineering feature on the London to Bristol route of what became the Great Western Railway. It is one of Britain’s most impressive railway tunnels and was the work of the immortal Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–59). If ever there was a man with a sense of theatre, it was Brunel. Here he built a tunnel which, with its classical portals, was designed to show how engineering and art could be combined in making a dramatic addition to the landscape. It is 3,212 yards long and built on a descending gradient of 1 in 100 going westwards towards Bath and Bristol. Those whose sole purpose in life seems to have been the forecasting of doom and gloom said that if the brakes failed on a train entering the eastern end, it would emerge from the western, that is, the lower end, at a speed of 120 mph, a velocity which would suffocate all the passengers. Others with equally avid relish argued that that such a long tunnel would inevitably collapse and crush a train passing through with a horrible death for all those on board. Fortunately neither of these melodramatic scenarios actually occurred.

However, the building of the tunnel was a project of heroic proportions. The tunnel had to be bored through solid rock, and so daunting a prospect was this that it was difficult to find contractors prepared to take the job on. The rock had to be broken with gunpowder before the miners could tackle it with picks. It was hot, damp, dark and unventilated; a nightmare scene. The workings were constantly flooded and quicksands were encountered. The spoil had to be winched up the construction shafts to the surface and the men got to their place of work by being winched down the shafts in baskets. It is hardly surprising that over 100 men lost their lives during the five years it took to build the tunnel. It opened without ceremony on 30 June 1841.

With so much drama and tragedy accompanying the building of the tunnel, it is hardly surprising that Box has attracted tales of the supernatural. Right from the start, the drivers of locomotives passing through the tunnel claim to have seen figures on the track, often silhouetted against the light at the tunnel mouth. Maintenance men whose job it is to walk the tunnel also report seeing spectral presences and some have gone so far as to describe them as looking like nineteenth-century labourers. The sound of steam-hauled trains passing through the tunnel long after regular steam ended on the Western Region of British Railways has been heard on many occasions. Equally puzzling is the sound of trains passing through the tunnel at times when it has been closed to all traffic for maintenance purposes.

A persistent legend attached to Box Tunnel is that Brunel designed the tunnel so that an observer standing at its western entrance on 9 April, his birthday, and looking through the straight bore, would be able to see the sun rising in the east and casting its rays through the entire length of the tunnel. This has always been taken as evidence of Brunel’s engineering genius and sense of the dramatic. Unfortunately, it is not true.

By way of a footnote, Great Western Railway signal boxes sported a rather attractive cast-iron plate on the front of the building which told the world the signal box’s name. That at the nearby Box Station was succinct and symmetrical. It simply said ‘Box Signal Box’. The line through the tunnel is still operational.

The western portal of Box Tunnel, designed in elegant style by I.K. Brunel. The tracks here were originally broad gauge.

Monkton Farleigh Mine

A short distance south-west of Box, under the hill on which the stumpy little curiosity known as ‘Brown’s Folly’ stands, lies what for decades was one of Britain’s best-kept secrets. Those who knew of its existence were required by the Official Secrets Act not to reveal this information to anyone. It was virtually an underground city. It covered 80 acres and was possibly the largest underground ammunition dump in the world!

This mysterious place was located in the long defunct Monkton Farleigh stone mine. The labyrinth of caves under the hill was identified by the Government in the 1930s as having the potential for use in wartime as a storage point for ammunition and/or other war supplies. A decision was reached to utilise the existing warren of caves and to create large extensions to the complex which would allow the storage of huge quantities of potentially volatile material deep below ground where the temperature and humidity would be more-or-less constant. The place provided the ideal conditions for an ammunition dump. A great advantage was that the proposed site in the erstwhile mine stood close to the main line from Swindon to Bath and Bristol, owned by the then Great Western Railway, and so the necessarily heavy, awkward and dangerous materials could be transported in and out by rail. Exchange sidings were built connecting it with a narrow-gauge railway system penetrating into the hillside.

Some people believe that the ghost of Brunel returns to this example of his engineering genius, Box Tunnel.

A hugely expensive building project was put into effect, costing billions of pounds by today’s standards. The complex even had its own medical centre and power station. It is estimated that 7,500 men were employed on the construction works, but only comparatively small numbers of men at any one particular time so that none of them were able to gain an overall view of what the entire project involved. Secrecy and security were maintained at the highest possible level while the work was going on and even more so once hostilities had commenced. A large workforce was in place during the war consisting largely of forces personnel but also considerable numbers of civilians, and again security requirements saw to it that each worker on the site was restricted just to his or her department and not permitted to enter other parts of the establishment. Patrols and pillboxes made it inadvisable for strangers, innocent or otherwise, to get too close.

Every effort was made to try to ensure the maximum possible safety on the site. All sorts of rumours circulated in the surrounding towns and villages about what exactly was going on at Monkton Farleigh and inevitably, once the Second World War started, it became widely but unofficially known that explosives were stored there. The locals might well have had reason to protest had they known that at the peak there were over 12 million shells being stored. A major explosion would have taken Box, Bathford and much of Bath itself with it.

In the late 1970s a museum was created in the then long disused underground complex, but somehow it did not seem to catch on and it closed within a few years. All is peaceful in the Monkton Farleigh area now but traces of the former activities can be found by the determined rambler around OS grid reference 800675. No ghosts have been reported associated with the mine but there is something undeniably eerie about this onetime hive of sinister activity and of any remaining relics associated with it. Also eerie is the idea of ‘ghost trains’ despatched from elsewhere to this destination ‘somewhere in southern England’ and which it was an offence to photograph let alone ask about. Despatching trains across Britain required locomotives, train-crew and rolling stock being provided for them, timetable paths being created, even wagon labels being written up and the progress of the train being carefully monitored from signal box to signal box as it proceeded on its way. The operation of these trains must have been an open secret, yet their existence was officially denied. Ghost trains, indeed, which ran to officially secret sidings where their contents was transhipped into equally secret narrow-gauge wagons and moved into a place that didn’t exist.

Headstones in Bromsgrove churchyard remembering those employed by the Birmingham & Gloucester Railway who were killed when the boiler of their locomotive exploded in November 1840. The ghosts of Driver Rutherford and Fireman Scaife are thought to rise from their graves from time to time.

WALES

Saltney Ferry

Saltney Ferry (Mold Junction) Station served passenger trains on the line from Chester to Mold and Denbigh. About three and a half miles west of Chester, it stood next to a motive power depot, which was a posh name for a place where locomotives were housed – in other words, an ‘engine shed’. This shed went by the name of Mold Junction and the platform at Saltney Ferry provided a good place for trainspotters to take the numbers of the locomotives housed there or just visiting. The Saltney district became an important one, from the railway point of view, with the engine shed, two stations, engineering workshops, a branch line down to wharves on the River Dee and two marshalling yards. Railways, until the run-down of freight and mineral traffic and the modernisation from the 1960s, were highly labour intensive and a substantial amount of property in the Saltney district was given over to housing railway workers and their families.

The area around Saltney Ferry Station was said to have been haunted by the ghost of an old man seen – but more often heard – pedalling around the area on a rusty bicycle with a notable squeak and a spookily flickering lamp. He did this during the witching hours of early morning darkness, and was spotted over the years by a number of railwaymen going to and from work on shifts involving anti-social hours. It was thought that he was the ghost of a man who had hanged himself in one of the railway buildings at Saltney.

Saltney Ferry Station closed in 1962 when passenger services were withdrawn between Chester and Denbigh. Mold Junction shed closed in 1966 and the marshalling yards were also run down and finally closed. There is little to tell the visitor of the past importance of Saltney in the history of the railways of Chester and North Wales. However, on the opposite side of the Crewe to Holyhead main line, which is still operational, stands a rather gaunt building which was a hostel for railway workers and which has now been converted into flats.

More surprisingly, Mold Junction engine shed survives. It is semi-derelict but houses part of a scrap yard. For those who have fond memories of engine sheds, it is still instantly recognisable for what it was, despite over forty years having passed since the sad occasion on which the last steam locomotive clanked away for work elsewhere or to meet its fate, cut up as so many of them were and the metal of which they were composed reprocessed for use as razor blades.

Mold Junction shed is indeed a place of ghosts.

Talybont-on-Usk

Brecon was a small but important town situated on the River Usk in which by the 1840s the business community felt was being held back by not being located on a railway. Local landowners and commercial interests therefore decided to sponsor a line south to Dowlais and Merthyr from where access would be possible to the whole of industrial and mining South Wales and particularly Newport, forty-seven miles away. The Brecon & Merthyr Tydfil Railway opened in 1863 from Brecon to Pant, and finally to Dowlais in 1869. It was a line with fearsome gradients as it drove southwards through the heart of the Brecon Beacons. Over six miles were on a gradient of 1 in 38 to a summit at Torpantau of 1,313ft above sea level. Coming northwards, Torpantau was reached via a gruelling climb at 1 in 47.

Talybont-on-Usk was a wayside station about seven miles south of Brecon. The line closed in 1962 and the station was eventually converted into an Outdoor Adventure Centre. The story goes that a party of schoolchildren were asleep one night in a dormitory when they were suddenly woken up by the sound of a steam train followed by crashing noises and screams. It was only in the morning that the children who all thought it had been a lark found out that there had been a railway accident at Talybont many years earlier and that perhaps the noise they heard was a ghostly reconstruction. There was indeed a fatal accident in 1878 and this had led to the development of a legend of a ghost train passing along the formation of the old railway, usually around ten past nine when the accident occurred.

SCOTLAND

Auldearn

Auldearn is a small village which possesses a very fine seventeenth-century dovecote, or doocot as they call them in these parts. Three miles east is the Hardmuir, a stretch of woodland which is thought to be the scene for the encounter of Macbeth and Banquo with the witches.

It is therefore entirely appropriate that Auldearn was the scene for the most remarkable of all Scottish witchcraft trials. This took place in 1662. Even without being tortured, the victim, a young girl, confessed to taking part in a series of bizarre rites. At her trial she confirmed most of the popular beliefs about witches – that their meetings were in covens numbering thirteen, they attended baptisms at which the Devil officiated and enjoyed satanic orgies in the woods. She admitted that she and her companions mounted straws, recited a spell and then rode around on the straws, transforming themselves at will into cats, hares and jackdaws. She went on to describe in lurid detail how the Auldearn coven had murdered the children of a local landowner. She related with gory relish how they had made clay effigies of the children and then thrust these into a fire thereby causing the children to die slow and extremely painful deaths. She also admitted to being on intimate terms with the Devil himself. She seems happily to have put herself in the frame for being a witch and a murderer, but there is no historical record of her fate. It is unlikely that she was presented with the freedom of Auldearn and more likely that she was burnt at the stake.

Auldearn formerly had a wayside station on what became the Highland Railway’s part of the Inverness to Aberdeen line. It closed in 1960.

Dunphail to Dava

In the 1840s complicated networks of railway lines were opening up in the heavily populated and industrialised Scottish Lowlands with their abundant coal and other mineral resources. Naturally the railway companies involved invested enthusiastically in this part of Scotland, licking their lips at the prospect of the lucrative returns from the business that was likely to be generated in that region. They were not so eager to turn their attention to the building of lines in the much more sparsely populated and less promising areas north and west of Perth. This left the citizens of Inverness and various other northern Scottish towns nursing a strong sense of grievance. It was already evident that railways were powerful generators of industrial and commercial activity and that those places that were left off the railway map or poorly served by railways were likely to stagnate and suffer from literally being off the beaten track.

This issue rumbled on for years without anything very positive happening. The Highlanders advanced the argument that much of northern Scotland had been opened up as a result of the roads built by General Wade in the eighteenth century. These roads had been largely paid for by the Government and, despite being designed primarily for military purposes, they had brought many economic benefits to impoverished parts of Scotland. Wasn’t it therefore time for the Government to reinvigorate the area by providing incentives for railway development in the region? Appeals for Government largesse fell on deaf ears, however. In the late 1840s local businessmen in Inverness began to consider the building of a railway to Aberdeen as far as possible along the south shore of the Moray Firth through Nairn, Forres and Elgin and then southwards using a number of river valleys to Aberdeen. This, at the time, seemed like the only feasible route to Aberdeen, the Lowlands and England. It was a roundabout route, but better than nothing. Some of the Aberdonian business community in turn were considering a railway from their city towards Inverness, using much the same route.

Inverness people would have preferred a route southwards towards Perth and the Lowlands, but the terrain between the two places seemed insurmountable given the power of steam locomotives at the time. In the event the Inverness party went ahead with obtaining parliamentary approval for a line eastwards to Nairn being built in the hope of benefiting the two linked towns, but apparently also as being seen as the possible first leg of a route to Perth. The Nairn line opened for passengers in November 1855, isolated from any other railway lines. In 1858 the Nairn line was extended eastwards to meet the Great North of Scotland line from Aberdeen at Keith.

The Nairn line had a very beneficial impact on the economies of Inverness and Nairn and it was not long before the idea of the Perth route resurfaced. Such a line, it was believed, would even more effectively put Inverness ‘on the map’. The Inverness & Perth Junction Railway was set up in a heady wave of enthusiasm not least because technology had moved on rapidly and locomotives could now be designed to scale the lofty summits required of a line south to Perth. The first sod was cut in October 1861 for a line south from Forres to Dunphail, across Dava Moor to Aviemore and on to Kingussie, Blair Athol and Perth. Crossing Dava Moor involved gradients of 1 in 70, and the exposed moors in the vicinity were particularly susceptible to heavy snow. This particular part of the route opened in 1864 and later became part of the financially challenged Highland Railway.

It was on the Forres to Aviemore section of what had by then become part of the Highland Railway that a mysterious event occurred in October 1919. A man who lived at the hamlet of Achanlochen had been spending the evening with a friend at Berryburn, and it was approaching midnight on a brightly moonlit night when he left to cycle home, intending to make some use of a track that ran along the side of the railway. When he got there, suddenly in front of him was a light so brilliant that he was forced to look away. Confused and not a little frightened, he got off his bicycle to attempt to investigate the phenomenon only to find it gradually fading away before he was any the wiser about what had caused it. As he made his way home, he was totally perplexed and must have wondered whether he had been hallucinating. He slept fitfully and resolved first thing the next morning to return to the railway and find out whether anyone else had seen the light. Here he was in luck because the first railwayman he met had also been out the previous night and seen the same mysterious bright light. He reported that a number of other people had also seen it. No one could provide any rational explanation and the general consensus was that something supernatural was at the bottom of the mystery. Whatever it was, there were no reports before nor have there been any since.

It may be churlish to mention it, but opinions on the reliability of the witness may be influenced by the fact that about two years earlier he claimed to have seen a cattle train on fire in the sky! Being charitable, we could say that this was associated with a previous accident on the line in which a cattle train had caught fire and the unfortunate creatures had all been immolated. Could it be that the powerful spirit associated with this part of Scotland had some influence on what he saw or thought he saw? After all, there are several distilleries close by.

The line across Dava Moor closed in 1965. The southern end of the line has reopened as the Strathspey Railway.

Kyle of Lochalsh

The fabled line from Dingwall to Kyke of Lochalsh was built by the Dingwall & Skye Railway Co. and was intended in the first instance to provide a boost for the livestock farmers of the districts through which it passed, enabling them to deliver their animals to the markets quickly by rail and in far better condition than if they had been herded on the hoof for hundreds of miles. It was also intended to help the fishing communities of what was then part of Ross & Cromarty to despatch their highly perishable catches far more quickly to markets in the more highly populated parts of Scotland.

The Highland Railway took the line over in 1877. Until 1897 the ‘Road to the Isles’ terminated at Strome Ferry but an extension to Kyle of Lochalsh opened in that year. Protestant fundamentalism was rife in these parts and not all of the meagre local population welcomed the development of railways. Sabbatarianism was deeply entrenched in these parts and led to many problems at Strome Ferry after the line opened and the railways tried to move wagons containing fish on a Sunday, this being generally held as a day on which no work for gain should under any circumstances be carried out. Obviously fish was a highly perishable cargo which the company needed to move as quickly as possible. No Sunday trains normally ran on the line, so attempting to run a special train on a Sunday in 1883 evoked ferocious and self-righteous wrath from the locals. A group of fishery workers refused to load a consignment of herrings and a fight broke out when the managers of the fishing company tried to load the fish. The Highland Railway was an impecunious company and it needed all the revenue it could get, and so it appealed to the Home Secretary. He despatched a force of burly Edinburgh police officers to ensure that the law was observed and tempers were allowed to cool. This did the trick. The sequel to this incident occurred when the Highland Railway billed the constabulary for the train fares of the officers who had travelled to Strome Ferry. The company graciously gave a discount on the fares but that made no difference to the Commissioner of Police who flatly refused to pay, failing to see why his force should pay the Highland for the privilege of protecting the company’s own property.

While Sabbatarianism provoked this militancy, many of the local population had their misgivings about the coming of the railways per se, largely because they were seen as ‘unnatural’ and also because they would open up this hitherto remote part of Scotland to all the malign, godless influences of modern civilisation. The Highland folk were great believers in omens and, shortly before the extension to Kyle of Lochalsh was completed, many of them claim to have seen a spectral steam-hauled train rushing balefully along the road leading to the Kyle. This apparition manifested itself only at night, but the locomotive made a fearful sight because it belched fire and brimstone and was equipped with piercing headlights. It cavorted down the narrow road and then eventually veered off across the nearby hills and lochs. Obviously no good could come of such an omen.

As a footnote to the issue of Sabbatarianism, it is worth recording that after the Tay Bridge Disaster, several clergymen used the event as the subject for their sermons and dwelt with undisguised relish on the fate of those who had so heinously chosen to travel by train on a Sunday.

The Glasgow Subway

Glaswegians have a great affection for the underground railway that serves their city, or at least some parts of it. They call it the ‘Clockwork Orange’, or the ‘Subway’, refusing to kow-tow to the city fathers who would prefer to dignify it with the name ‘Underground’. The route is about six and a half miles in length, not circular in shape, and it serves fifteen stations. It opened to the public on 14 December 1896.

It may be a small system but in proportion to its length it has done quite well for attracting mysterious events. The best-known of these is the story of the so-called ‘Grey Lady’ whose ghost has reportedly been seen in the tunnels around Shields Road Station in what is now a very lonely and depopulated part of the ‘Southside’. In 1922 a woman and a small girl inexplicably fell off an almost empty platform onto the track. A station worker leapt to their rescue. His gallant effort saved the girl but the woman died. Her spirit has seemingly refused to leave the scene.

One night the trains had stopped running and were being marshalled for maintenance purposes at the Govan depot. One of the tasks of the workers on the night shift was to check that no passengers were actually left on board – those who perhaps had fallen asleep, for example. On this occasion a team of five men passed through a number of carriages and, sure enough, there was a man apparently happily dozing, dressed in a raincoat and wearing a flat cap like so many thousands of others in the city. They woke him up and told him that he had to follow them through the empty rolling stock and out to the street entrance. He seemed perfectly amenable although rather slow on his feet, and he followed them as instructed. They repeatedly looked back to allow him to catch up and they had just got to the exit from the depot when they looked back for the final time only to find that he had vanished into thin air! There was absolutely nowhere that he could have secreted himself. The men searched high and low and with great care but they found no trace of him. Completely baffled, they knew they hadn’t been seeing things. To this day, this mysterious appearance and disappearance has never been explained.

Govan Depot used to have the reputation of being haunted by a ghostly figure which seemed to like to climb into the driving cabs of the Subway cars. Obviously a stranger in such a place had to be investigated, but, try as they might, the night workers could never actually catch him at it because, just like the previous gentleman with the raincoat and flat cap, he simply evaporated. However, when his pursuers entered the driver’s cab where he had been spotted, they always found it empty and much, much colder than its surroundings. Icily and unnaturally so.

Other unexplained phenomena on the Glasgow Subway include mysterious noises like the repeated sound of a hammer hitting a rail between St Enoch and Bridge Street stations when maintenance work was being done at night. Also there used to be what are described as singing noises, for all the world like a female choir, heard by night-time cleaners working in the tunnels between Kelvinbridge and Hillhead stations where the line is quite deep underground.

Pinwherry

Pinwherry is a wayside station on the long secondary main line from Girvan to Stranraer. The line was built by the Girvan & Portpatrick Railway and opened in 1870. It met the Portpatrick & Wigtownshire joint line from Dumfries at Challoch Junction and had running powers over its line through Stranraer to Portpatrick.

Shields Road Station at platform level. This is an ill-frequented station on the ‘Clockwork Orange’, Glasgow’s subway system.

A story, amusing rather than paranormal, is told about Pinwherry. One night an exceptionally heavy southbound freight train was scheduled from Girvan to Stranraer. The only locomotive available was a small and underpowered one. It was obvious that it could not tackle the 1 in 54 gradient of Glendoune Bank with the whole train so a decision was taken to divide the train and take half as far as Pinmore. The locomotive would then return to Girvan and hook up with the second half of the train, bring it to Pinmore where the two halves could be united and taken over the easier gradients on to Stranraer. The first section was worked through to Pinmore and the locomotive detached as planned. However, before the brakes on the wagons could be pinned down, they began to move down the incline they had just come up, gathering speed as they went. Luckily there were no other trains expected as these wagons almost joyfully rushed down through Pinwherry. The station there was in a dip after which the line climbed towards Girvan. This gradient slowed them down and they eventually halted for a second before gravity took over and back they hurtled through Pinwherry once more. They continued to roll to and fro at least six times, slowly losing momentum before coming to a rest close to Pinwherry Station. A permanent way inspector was lodging for the night in the stationmaster’s house and at breakfast next morning he was rather grumpy. He had hardly had a wink all night, he said, because trains were hurtling through the station every few minutes. Never, he stated, in over twenty years service on the railways, had he ever known such a busy country station. It’s just as well he didn’t look out of the window or he may well have seen a ghost train with wagons but no locomotive rushing past.

Pinwherry; the scene of a restless night for the inspector staying in the station house.

The line from Girvan to Stranraer is still operational. At Pinmore, incidentally, the ghost of a woman who threw herself under a train has been seen from time to time.

The Tay Bridge

The River Tay has its source in a corrie on the slopes of Ben Lui in the Grampians, and it flows 110 miles to pass Dundee and enter the sea. Dundee had become a major industrial centre by the nineteenth century, but it was finding the Firth of Tay a formidable natural barrier to the development of its industries, the famous ‘three J’s’ – jute, jam and journalism. Until the 1860s the received wisdom was that the Firth was so wide that there was no possibility of a bridge being built across it in the vicinity of Dundee.

That there was a need for a bridge across the Tay cannot be denied. To journey the mere forty-six miles from Edinburgh involved the traveller having a strong stomach, a stoical lack of imagination and plenty of time; well over three hours or more when there were any of the frequent storms on the Forth and the Tay. From Edinburgh Waverley the train trundled the short distance to Granton where the passengers boarded a ferry and lurched dyspeptically across the Forth to Burntisland. There a train waited to take them to Newport on the south side of the Tay where the woebegone travellers embarked on a second ferry and crossed the Firth to Broughty Ferry from where yet a third train waited to take them the short distance to Dundee.

The prize for the railway company that built a bridge across the Tay would be a rich one and the benefits for Dundonians would be enormous. A bridge would need to be two miles long, and no bridge on this scale had ever been built. It would be an object of enormous pride for the citizens of Dundee, giving the city the direct route to the south that it desperately needed and thereby putting the city firmly on the national map. The North British Railway Co. decided to grasp the nettle and they engaged Thomas Bouch, an experienced builder of railway structures, as its engineer. Work started on 22 July 1871. To ensure sufficient headroom for shipping on the Tay, the rails would pass through the most elevated central part of the bridge in what became known as the ‘High Girders’. On the rest of the bridge the rails would run along the top of box girders.

As the bridge began to take shape, distinguished visitors came to gaze at this new wonder of the world. These included the old King of Brazil who got so carried away that he argued for a similar but somewhat longer bridge to be built across the mouth of the Amazon! Prince Leopold of Prussia was another royal, but the most popular celebrity seems to have been General Ulysses Simpson Grant, eighteenth President of the USA and a hero of the Union Army. His nickname was ‘Old Glory’, and the crowds gave him a marvellous reception, but despite his swashbuckling reputation it soon became obvious that whenever he was asked a question it was always his wife who answered it. The only time he managed to forestall her was when he was canvassed for his opinion of the bridge. ‘It’s a very long bridge,’ he said. This rather dull statement accorded with the generally accepted view that Grant was the strong and silent sort, but it still elicited a cheer from the crowd if only because it was the first time any of them had actually heard the general speak.

The first train to cross this prodigious bridge was a ‘directors’ special’ which did so on 26 September 1877. The bridge still had to undergo examination by an inspecting officer from the Royal Engineers on behalf of the Board of Trade before it could be passed as fit to carry fare-paying passengers. The inspector was the very model of a modern major-general by the name of Charles Scrope Hutchinson. He was a meticulous and incorruptible man who spent three days examining the bridge minutely, walking it from end to end, travelling over it on a special train, poking about under it in a boat and even surveying it from a distance with a telescope and finally a theodolite. He passed the bridge as fit for public use with the proviso of a speed limit of 25mph. He added what in retrospect was an ominous rider to his report. These were his words: ‘I should wish, if possible, to have an opportunity of observing the effects of a high wind when a train of carriages is running over the bridge.’

This caveat not withstanding, Dundee was en fête. Bouch was the hero of the day, fit to stand in the pantheon of British heroes alongside the likes of Drake, the Duke of Marlborough and Nelson. Bathing in this popular adulation, Bouch was already engaged in preliminary work for a bridge across the Firth of Forth to replace the Granton to Burntisland ferry. The Queen visited Dundee, took a trip across the bridge and knighted Bouch. On that day the city’s schoolchildren were given a day off, and the dear little weans were soon sinking their fangs into ‘Tay Bridge Rock’, each and every one of them having been presented with this sticky sweetmeat as a memento of the occasion. As sweetmeats they were greatly appreciated. As souvenirs, they were a complete failure.

It was soon obvious that not all was well with the bridge. Trains were crossing it at speeds considerably in excess of the prescribed 25mph, maintenance men were noticing a disconcerting number of bolts and rivets which had worked loose, and they also talked about the excessive vibration which occurred when trains passed over the bridge, especially if they were going too fast.

On Sunday 28 December 1879 an appalling storm was causing structural damage in Dundee and whipping the waters of the Tay into waves that hit the piers of the bridge with sufficient force to produce spray and spindrift that the wind flung over the trains far above. It was truly a terrifying tempest. The awesome power of the wind brought people out to gaze at the churned-up waters of the Tay, and all averred they had never seen a storm like it. The bridge was still a major talking-point with Dundonians and inevitably people watched with fascination as the last trains of the day made their way across. Sparks and flashes were to be seen as the trains moved through the ‘High Girders’. Perhaps they were red-hot coals from the locomotives’ fireboxes. It became evident later that the cause of at least some of them was the friction created on the wheel flanges and on the rails when the trains were hit by especially powerful gusts as they were passing through the ‘High Girders’.

The very last train of the day was the 5.20 p.m. from Burntisland, and several people were watching its progress across the bridge when there was a sudden flurry of flashes just as the moon emerged and suffused the firth in silvery light. To their horror, the watchers saw that there was a breach in the High Girders. The bridge was down!

The train had been hit by an extra-strong gust of wind, perhaps as much as 110mph, when it was within the girders, a section of which was dislodged, whereupon it fell into the icy waters below. All the seventy-five passengers thought to be on board drowned and the bodies of twenty-nine of them were never recovered. The train stayed remarkably intact, having been protected from damage by the ironwork of the girders themselves. The locomotive was a 4-4-0, North British No.224, and she was so little damaged by her submarine adventure that she was recovered, repaired and returned to traffic. However, she never ventured across the Tay Bridge after it was rebuilt. The North British Co. thought it sensible to roster No.224 for duties elsewhere. Besides, it was quite possible that superstitious footplatemen would refuse to work it over the bridge as it was thought of as a ‘jinxed’ locomotive, although only in that particular location. Its exploits earned it the nickname ‘The Diver’.

Ever since that fateful night at the end of 1879, people on the anniversary claim to have seen a ghostly steam train crossing the bridge from the Fife end and suddenly disappearing from sight with sparks and flashes galore. This kind of supernatural experience is often referred to as a re-enactment haunting and is not uncommon where events involving extreme emotions have taken place. A dispassionate view would be that such a thing was simply impossible. However, there has been a constant procession of people who have come forward claiming to have seen this spectral train on the night in question.

The Tay Bridge shortly after it opened. The ‘High Girders’ which collapsed, carrying the train with them, can be seen.

The ‘High Girders’ have gone!

A view of the missing section of Tay Bridge.

Sir Thomas Bouch bore the brunt of the criticism for the collapse of the Tay Bridge. Revisionist historians think he was made a scapegoat. This is his memorial in Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh.

More static ghosts are some of the piers of Bouch’s ill-fated bridge, many of which can still be seen from the Fife or southern shore protruding from the river and alongside the replacement bridge.

The Waverley Route

Without a doubt one of Britain’s most fabled main lines was the Waverley Route, so-called because the line passed near Abbotsford, the home of the once very popular novelist, Sir Walter Scott. His prolific output of loosely historical novels had started with Waverley, published in 1814. It would not be unfair to say that this line has generated an interest out of all proportion to its former importance as a part of the country’s railway network. Perhaps its fascination is wrapped up with the nature of the terrain it traversed. Once it was beyond the outer environs of Edinburgh, the route passed through largely empty and remote countryside and through hills whose gradients provided a stern test for the mettle of locomotives and footplatemen. With good reason the local drivers and firemen called it ‘The Long Line’.

Also, this was once the territory of the Border Reivers. These were the people who, 400 years ago and less, gave the world a preview of organised gangsterism as they roamed the bleak countryside feuding, raiding, extorting and engaging in family vendettas and almost always doing so with complete immunity from authority. Something of the emotionally charged atmosphere their activities created still clings to the windswept fells and dales of this beautiful but harsh countryside. A few miles from the line and not far from the present Hawick to Newcastleton road stands Hermitage Castle. Is there any equally desolate spot in Britain containing such a sinister-looking building? Hermitage was associated with Lord Soulis, a fiend in human form capable of every form of atrocity and wickedness. His activities were recalled in verse, a fragment of which gives a flavour: 

The axe he bears, it hacks and tears,

‘Tis form’d of an earth-fast flint;

No armour of knight, tho’ ever so wight,

Can bear its deadly dint.

No danger he fears, for a charmed sword he wears,

Of adderstone the hilt:

No Tynedale knight had ever such might,

But his heart-blood was spilt.

The origins of the line date back to 1845 when the North British Railway Co. obtained powers to build a line from Edinburgh to Hawick, and this opened in 1849. The hills through which the line passed supported vast numbers of sheep. The pure water which tumbled off the fells was excellent for processing the raw wool which was then worked up in towns like Galashiels and Hawick into high-quality material generically known as ‘tweed’. The North British saw good business in supporting the expansion of the woollen industry in this area not least by being able to bring in cheap coal from the Lothian coalfield to power the mill furnaces.

By the time the line had reached Hawick, that town was no longer the ultimate goal. The North British now had Carlisle in its sights. There was an awful lot of barren moorland in the forty-three miles from Hawick to Carlisle, with heavy engineering works and little possibility of much intermediate originating traffic. The border city was only reached in 1862 and the southern end was a financial liability, built like a main line but only earning frugal branch line revenue until 1876.

In that year the English-based Midland Railway reached Carlisle with its own independent line from Settle and Leeds. There was little love lost between the North British and Midland railway companies serving Carlisle on the one hand and the Caledonian and London & North Western companies on the other. The former companies now had between them a through route from Edinburgh to London (St Pancras) via Leeds. The Midland had an arrangement with the Glasgow & South Western Railway Co. whereby traffic from Glasgow via Kilmarnock and Dumfries could also be channelled via the Settle and Carlisle line to Leeds, the East Midlands and London. This meant that the Waverley route now became part of a trunk Anglo-Scottish facility, and so it assumed a new identity as an important main line.

The dramatic countryside through which the Waverley route passes has for long attracted railway photographers. Early in the 1950s one such photographer decided to spend a day in the vicinity of Shankend. This had a minor and ill-frequented station just south of Hawick, and at one time a fine mansion had stood on the hillside overlooking the line. By this time it had been abandoned and was a derelict and forbidding hulk surrounded by policies which had become wild and overgrown. Wherever you were in the Shankend area, somehow it was impossible to ignore the presence of this brooding relic.

The photographer was an old hand, well-used to carting his equipment across fields and through thickets in his search for the best lineside locations, but Shankend was new to him. This time it wasn’t impenetrable brambles or fast-flowing streams that put him off but a horribly threatening sense of an unseen malignant presence. So real was the apprehension that he felt, even on this sunny summer’s day, that he decided to leave without having taken even a single picture. He could not help thinking that if the place was so threatening on a day like that, it could only be a thousand times more so on a grey and gloomy November afternoon. What would it be like in the witching hours?

Later he talked to fellow railway photographers and those who had been to the Shankend area all agreed that there was indeed something horrible about the atmosphere there. Two of them said that they would never return. Enquiries established that the big house had been requisitioned for use as a prisoner-of-war camp during the First World War. The inmates suffered an appalling visitation of typhoid, sometimes called ‘gaol fever’, and the victims had been buried in graves scattered around the policies close to the house. When the war was over the house was put out to rent, but those who moved in quickly moved out. The place got a bad name, became hard to let and eventually was left vacant and fell into disrepair. Was it the ghosts of the POWs that exuded the air of menace around Shankend?

It may well have been the presence of the same former prisoner-of-war camp that spoiled the efforts of a well-known recorder of railway sounds. Trains worked hard up the gradient near Shankend and made an ideal subject for sound recording. The recorder stood close to the lineside, having found what he thought was the ideal spot. His hobby required patience and fortitude but as he waited in the dark he knew it was wise not to allow his imagination too full a rein in a spot as bleak and remote as this. At last he heard a distant lonesome whistle and the sound of a labouring locomotive which heralded the approach of a suitable subject for a recording. He got his equipment ready when he became aware of strange, rather eerie noises coming from a nearby copse. A trifle put out but not daunted by this unwelcome sound, he tried to switch the recorder on but one of the tapes jammed just at the critical moment. The train heaved itself up the hill, approaching and then passing with a crescendo of just the kind of sounds he wanted to record for posterity. He fiddled impotently with his recorder but it was no good. That was one train that got away. Somewhat mortified, he decided to call it a day. As the sound of the hard-working engine reverberated from the surrounding hills and gradually faded away, he became aware that it was as black as Newgate Knocker, that he was very much alone and there had been those strange sounds coming from somewhere close by. Fortunately they had stopped, but it had suddenly become colder.

He was clearly a man of resource, however, because early next morning he returned to the same location, not to do any recording but to investigate the little wood from which the unnerving sounds had come. Under the trees were small iron markers recording the burial places of Germans who had died in the typhoid outbreak at the nearby prison camp.

One of the most extraordinary places on the Waverley Route was Riccarton Junction, not very far south of Shankend, where the route met a line known as the Border Counties Railway, which had opened at the same time. This railway backwater meandered southwards through hopelessly empty country with few settlements of any size until it reached the valley of the North Tyne. At Hexham it joined up with the North Eastern Railway’s Newcastle–Carlisle line.

Riccarton Junction was an exceptionally desolate and isolated spot on an exposed hillside about fifteen miles south of Hawick and a considerable distance from any road. For that reason Riccarton Junction was totally dependent on the railway for its communications with the outside world. The community there had been created by the North British Railway as a depot for the small locomotives that spent their lives ‘banking’. This involved the locomotives attaching themselves to the rear of trains and shoving them by brute force up to and over Whitrope Summit. There was also a depot where the various engineering materials and tools were kept to maintain the track and other equipment in the area. The company built thirty cottages to house the railway workers and their families. There was a co-op shop, a sub post office, a refreshment room, a one-teacher infant and junior school and a social club in the station yard. On alternate Sundays, a couple of local trains stopped to pick up any of the residents who wanted to worship in either Hawick or Newcastleton, but there were never many takers.

To be honest few of the North British’s employees volunteered for duties at Riccarton Junction. The truth was that many of the workers there had been sent, often for disciplinary reasons, to a place regarded as a punishment, a kind of ‘sin bin’ where they could perhaps do the least damage. Given its isolation, this meant that the settlement resembled nothing so much as a lawless frontier town in the Wild West. Rumours circulated about an outbreak of incest at Riccarton Junction and of riotous communal orgies, and a company official was despatched to investigate. Perhaps to his disappointment he found no particular evidence of sexual irregularities but reported that the village was effectively being run by a gang of four women who made life an absolute hell for anyone to whom they took a dislike. It was serious enough that the procurator-fiscal and the police became involved, but although they sent the formidable viragos concerned on their way, Riccarton Junction continued to have a reputation for lawlessness.

In such a necessarily self-contained community it was of course inevitable that from time to time the residents would get on each others’ nerves, but some relief was offered on a Saturday when a late afternoon train called which some of them used to travel southwards to Newcastleton. The goal was the Grapes Inn. There was no return train and so the sozzled revellers had little option but to walk the eight or more miles in the cess alongside the railway track. It was only to be expected that there were several near-misses over the years, and the company officially frowned on the practice.

The line witnessed an extremely unpleasant outbreak of racial violence among the railway labourers employed in construction work in the Gorebridge area south of Dalkeith. The Irish workers on the site had a grievance about their pay and they retired in high dudgeon to a local pub to drown their sorrows. An itinerant peddler was trying to sell watches and handed two round for prospective buyers to look at. They were seized by the navvies who refused to hand them back, and then things turned nasty. Two Irishmen were arrested only for a large number of others to force the police to give them up. The navvies were triumphant but still angry when they came across a couple more police officers on their way to the scene. A fight broke out during which one of the officers received fatal injuries.

This incident incensed the Scottish and English navvies working locally and a large force forced the Irish to retreat and then ransacked and destroyed their encampment, this being done, so it was alleged, while the police looked the other way. The word got around, the Irish calling up reinforcements, and an uneasy peace was only restored after troops were called out. The unfortunate police officer was buried in Borthwick Kirkyard, but it appears that his spirit refused to take things lying down and that he was frequently seen, in the form of a police officer wearing an early style of uniform, wandering restlessly in the vicinity of these tragic events. He has not been seen since the line closed.

Fine Art Deco relief sculpture decorating the LMSR side of Leeds City Station.

The proposal to close the line was one of the most controversial in Dr Beeching’s package of changes with which he hoped would make the railways pay their way. The line closed on the first weekend of January 1969 amid warnings that lineside bombs were due to be detonated as the last train went past. At Hawick a party dressed as undertakers boarded the train carrying a coffin inscribed: ‘Waverley Line, born 1849, killed 1969. Aged 120 years.’ At Newcastleton the locals, led by the vicar, staged a sit-down strike which further delayed the already very late last train.

With a detailed map, a compass, stout walking boots and the right clothes, parts of the line can still be followed today by those with a rugged constitution and determined disposition. Some of the splendid viaducts and earthworks can be viewed from the windows of their cars by those who prefer their creature comforts. The only trains that pass now are, of course, ghost trains.