The mainline railway network of Greater London is one of extraordinary complexity. However, compared to the system in the provinces, London’s railways have escaped relatively unscathed from the welter of line and station closures which began during the First World War, continuing intermittently through the 1950s and then surging in the 1960s and ’70s, only to become thankfully much more intermittent since that time.
There is something poignant about stations on which the lights have gone out forever. It is easy for us to imagine that the men and women who worked in these places, the passengers that went to and fro and perhaps even the trains themselves return in spectral form to the places with which they were once so familiar.
There are a myriad such sites in London. A few suggestions might include the Seven Sisters to Palace Gates branch of the Great Eastern Railway, the branch from Nunhead to Greenwich Park, traces of the London, Chatham and Dover line from Nunhead to Crystal Palace High Level, the mothballed line between Epping and Ongar or the London & North Western Railway’s branch line from Harrow and Wealdstone to Stanmore Village. We can be sure that these and many similar places have their ghosts!
CRYSTAL PALACE
The district around Crystal Palace did have an underground railway of sorts, and a particularly interesting one. There have been reported sightings of ghosts associated with this railway.
The Great Exhibition was held in Hyde Park in London in 1851. It was considered an enormous success at the time and unexpectedly large numbers of visitors flocked from all parts of Britain and many overseas places in order to enjoy the spectacle. Londoners and others took the Crystal Palace to their hearts and wanted it to stay in Hyde Park as a permanent fixture. However, this was impossible under the terms governing the staging of the exhibition and it was quickly dismantled when the exhibition closed. An enlarged version of the building was located at Sydenham Hill and the district round about quickly came to be known as ‘Crystal Palace’.
The ‘ghost’ tram lines emerging into Kingsway from the old tram tunnel. It is well over fifty years since trams ran along these tracks.
In 1864, about ten years after the relocation of the Crystal Palace, an experimental demonstration ‘pneumatic’ railway was built in the grounds. A passenger carriage ran on a broad-gauge track for a distance of 600 yards through a tunnel, quickly and silently. A return fare, expensive at 6d a time, proved no deterrent to those who wanted to sample this novel form of propulsion. The success of this small-scale operation encouraged a company to propose what would have been London’s first tube railway, one that would have run under the Thames. However, it was abandoned because of the financial crisis of 1866. The stub of this tunnel is apparently still in situ.
A few years after its closure a myth developed that the carriage remained within the bricked-up tunnel at Crystal Palace and contained a grisly cargo of skeletal forgotten passengers. These physical human remains may have been unable to do anything about their predicament but their accompanying spirits were apparently highly indignant about being immured in this way and were waiting to exact revenge from the living. Traces of this tunnel could be seen for many years and in the early 1990s an edition of the New Civil Engineer carried an article with photographs taken many years earlier inside the tunnel. No abandoned carriage containing equally abandoned skeletons was to be seen, and if there were ghosts they chose not to manifest themselves. According to the article, no trace of the tunnel still survived. This has not prevented occasional reports of spectres in the vicinity.