The ending of mainline steam trains on British Railways in 1968 received extensive coverage in the media of the time, but no sooner had this happened than stories started circulating that there were ghost trains on the London Underground! Steam-hauled passenger trains on the Metropolitan Line had ended in 1961 but London Transport had long used a small fleet of steam locomotives on engineers’ and various other departments’ trains on the sub-surface lines. There had always been something rather mysterious and surreptitious about these trains which mainly ran at night, and the unmistakeable sound and smell of steam locomotives at work in the witching hours began to create a new piece of London folklore. Ghostly steam trains were at large on the Underground!
Deltic-class locomotive. The ghost of a locomotive of this class, No.55020 Nimbus, is said to haunt Hadley Wood Tunnel to the north of London on the East Coast Main Line.
Since the 1970s there have been occasional reports of a ghostly steam locomotive which manifests itself on the Northern Line between East Finchley Station and the nearby Wellington Sidings. The stretch of line between Gipsy Hill and Crystal Palace is very hilly and between the two stations the line runs through Crystal Palace Tunnel. This tunnel is reputed to be haunted. Many years ago a track maintenance worker was run down and killed by a train in the tunnel. He was decapitated in the process. His ghost has been seen on many occasions wandering disconsolately around the tunnel apparently engaged in the search for his missing head.
Hadley Wood Station is a semi-rural suburban station in a cutting between tunnels on the line out of Kings Cross. For long the double track through Hadley Wood had been a considerable bottleneck, and eventually in 1959 the line at this point was quadrupled. The tunnels go by the simple names of Hadley Wood North and Hadley Wood South. Some people believe that Hadley Wood South Tunnel is haunted by a ghostly diesel locomotive. This is D9020, later known as No.55020, one of the famed ‘Deltic’-class, named Nimbus after a classic racehorse.