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Phantom Trains

A

Anonymous

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Does anyone have any good links, stories ('true' or fictional) regarding phantom trains. More specifically Harry Potter (sorry) type trains from different dimensions that can be boarded, as it were.
 
Try to find the 'Ghost Train' - a play by Arnold Ridley (the doddering one in Dad's Army. It's been done on tv, theatre and radio and is a most excellent, entertaining work.
 
There's Stephen Laws, 'The Ghost Train'.

There's been several anthologies of railway ghost stories (which usually include Charles Dickens 'The Signalman', which is a good ghost story, if not exactly what you're looking for), can't remember the exact titles though.
 
There's also a very good book called 'Railway Ghosts' which scared me stiff as a youngster, well-written and with plenty of genuine, findable locations.

(Like the story of Aubrey the signalman, who carried on turning up for work with his scooter helmet tucked under his arm for some time after his death! Yaarrgh!)
 
The Ghost Now Standing at Platform One - Edited by Richard Peyton.

it has a collection of stories in it, including Ridley's 'Journey into Fear', Dickens' Signal Man, and quite a few other decent ghost train stories (the last one "Lonely train a 'comin'" is particularly good) :)
 
escargot said:
There's also a very good book called 'Railway Ghosts' which scared me stiff as a youngster, well-written and with plenty of genuine, findable locations.

(Like the story of Aubrey the signalman, who carried on turning up for work with his scooter helmet tucked under his arm for some time after his death! Yaarrgh!)

I got that some years ago in a library sale - it is a good book . . . we keep it in our loo. Useful for when you're constipated . . . :laughing:

Carole
 
There is a children's book by John Bellairs called, "The Trolley to Yesteryear." The trolley in question is in the basement of a house and travels through time. Bellairs wrote a series of books for children, in which the young protagonists (usually orphaned) go to live with strange relatives who are wizards/warlocks etc etc... The most famous of these is probably "The House With a Clock In Its Walls."

Might be out of print.
 
Something of an interest of mine - railways are my job and forteanea is an interest so I'd love to see 'something' at work, doing nightshifts on lonely railway lines, but it's not happened yet. Hopefully one day though..

Anyway, I give you -

link 1

link 2
 
Perhaps not exactly what you were after, but Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere" includes some rather supernatural London Underground train carriages at various points.
 
Also worth a mention is Clive Barkers short story "The Midnight Meat Train" from the first Book of Blood. Probably his finest moment.
 
Russian Story

There's a Russian story of two young boys in the very early 19th Century who are chased through the forest by a giant, screaming, roaring, one-eyed monster. Years later, as adults, they witness the first locomotive to travel through the area, on newly-laid tracks, and they realize what they'd "seen" 20 or 30 years earlier.
 
There seem to be a LOT more Phantom Trains in short stories than there have ever been in actual paranormal reality.

People sometimes try to correct my opinion by citing the Abraham Lincoln Ghost Train. But the ALGT is much more an "eerily patriotic legend" than anomalous experience. I've NEVER heard a first-hand report.

But what DOES appear to have some validity are all those reports explaining how "Old Joe, the dead switchman, decapitated by a locomotive, walks the tracks with a lantern, searching for his missing head."

What we are actually dealing with here, of course, are glowing electrical-plasma BOLs (balls of light) following the steel railroad tracks,

In the Wesern Hemisphere there's an enormous web of those steel rails extending from the Canadian Yukon clear down to Southern Chile and Argentina. God only knows what electrical energies pulse through that great grid.
 
Strangers on a Train

W.B Herbert's Railway Ghosts and Phantoms boasts a few nuggets of High Strangeness alongside the more conventional ghost stories. For example; the tale of Alistair Robertson who was travelling home on a busy train from Kings Cross. As the train passed though a long tunnel, the lights went out and he saw a strange luminous mist gathering above the seat opposite.

The mist slowly formed into the shape of an old man smartly dressed in a business suit and smiling benignly. Through the mist which was still swirling behind the man, Alistair could see some kind of window, behind which a crowd of people were "moaning and wailing as if in great distress".

The stranger leaned forward towards Alistair, his smile becoming rather sinister. He began to assume "grotesque proportions" and seemed to be "rising out of his seat coming closer and closer to Alistair, who was now terrified and trying to force himself back into his seat".

In the darkness, Alistair could neither hear nor see the other passengers in the crowded carriage. In desperation, he tried to push the stranger away, but his hand simply went though him. The man leaned back and leered, then he gradually disappeared in a misty swirl. "The sounds of conversation of his fellow passengers returned, the sound of the rail joints was there, normality was supreme".

There was, of course, no one sitting in the seat opposite, and the passengers across the aisle were chatting away happily - obviously oblivious to the events which Alistair had just witnessed.

There's also a rather odd tale of phantom passengers in Arthur Shuttlewoods largely unreadable book The Flying Sorcerers.

TV Executive 'Marion' regularly commuted by train to Bristol. On one journey, two young men boarded the train at Warminster and sat opposite her. They looked like typical students - dressed in jeans and denim jackets. Just after the train had left the station, one of them leaned forward and tapped Marion on the shoulder. He pointed out of the window, saying "Would you be prepared to believe that impression on the hillside was made by a UFO landing?"

Marion looked to where he was pointing and saw a steep hill with a vivid white "circular impression" near the foot - rather like "a child's drawing of the sun".

"I really don't know. It could be, I suppose," replied the baffled Marion, and returned to reading her book. When she reached her station, the men "bade her a studiously polite farewell", one of them saying: "Would you believe we are not of your planet Earth?". The men advised her to look out for the hill in the future, then went on their way.

Marion assumed that the pair were simply pranksters, but nevertheless she kept an eye out for the hill they had pointed out to her as she was travelling to work the next day.

"I did this - and have done this every morning and evening since then," she reported. "But I've never seen that circular white sun again, nor the actual hill... it simply vanished as if it had never existed in the first place!"
 
Question

When a lightning bolt strikes a steel railroad track, how far does the charge travel? (I assume it would do so equally in both directions.)
 
Re: Question

OldTimeRadio said:
When a lightning bolt strikes a steel railroad track, how far does the charge travel? (I assume it would do so equally in both directions.)
I suspect that such a strike would be very rare, if not actually impossible.

Lightning tends to strike high, pointy things (eg, church spires), rather than low flat things like rails. Perhaps a rail track on an embankment over low-lying land might get hit, but I still suspect lighting would focus on yet higher objects like railway signals or telegraph poles on the embankment.

But if a rail was hit, metal is a good conductor, so the charge would rapidly travel to the nearest point where it could reach earth - which depending on the actual railway construction, might be the metal fastenings holding the rails to the sleepers - so only a foot or two of travel at most!

But possibly ball lightning (whatever that might be) would find itself constrained to follow the line of a conductor, although exactly how it would do so without being actually attracted to the rail and getting earthed I do not know. (Ask a professional physicist!)
 
Stormkhan said:
Try to find the 'Ghost Train' - a play by Arnold Ridley (the doddering one in Dad's Army. It's been done on tv, theatre and radio and is a most excellent, entertaining work.
Your wish is my command - it's on Radio, available on BBC iPlayer right now! 8)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... ost_Train/

(I've never heard it before - extra bonus for me, it appears to be set on a train from Exeter to Truro...)
 
rynner2 said:
Stormkhan said:
Try to find the 'Ghost Train' - a play by Arnold Ridley (the doddering one in Dad's Army. It's been done on tv, theatre and radio and is a most excellent, entertaining work.
Your wish is my command - it's on Radio, available on BBC iPlayer right now! 8)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... ost_Train/

(I've never heard it before - extra bonus for me, it appears to be set on a train from Exeter to Truro...)

There's also a load of film versions/rip-offs that you've probably seen over the years. Arthur Askey did one, and the Will Hay classic Oh! Mr Porter lifts the plot to adapt to its star's talents.
 
Best seen on stage.

One of my first ever paid jobs was as a stagehand for a week when the play visited my local theatre. The scene where the 'phantom' train passes through the station was done without recorded sound effects - everything was done backstage with lawnrollers run over battened planks, whistles, compressed air cylinders, a spinning lampshade thing with slots in it to emulate the lights of the passing carriages and various other things I can't now recall, all operated by half a dozen berserk stage hands.

Great fun.
 
A theatre group I used to be with did the Ghost Train and we build this wonderfull Heath Robinson contraption with cut-out windows in three sheet of plywood that we pulled on track in front of three floods to give the effect of the train going by...had great fun with the smoke machine too... :).
 
A different ending from what I'd expected - which is good!

(And one with many echoes in Cornish history/folklore.)


I'd expected it to follow the theme of a short story I once read

...but I'll say no more on that because i don't want to be a spoiler for future readers.
 
In the Stockholm Underground, where the trains are painted green or blue, there was one set of eight cars that was never painted (here’s what it looked like) but still was in service for decades. This was really a prototype train they bought, that wasn’t supposed to be painted, and later they decided not to buy more ... I think. Something like that.

This was known as the ”Silver Train” or supposedly the ”Silver Arrow” (though I never heard anyone actually say that), and over the years I don’t know how many times I’ve read in papers and magazines that there was supposed to be a lot of folklore around this train. People thought it was a ghost train, didn’t wanna ride on it etc, and it was supposed to stop at our ghost station*, people were supposed to have been killed and bla bla.

The thing is, I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never heard anyone actually express any such ideas.
It was just a third type of underground car – there was green, blue and now this – and we always thought it was cool to ride on it because it was so rare. To this day it annoys me to read about how everyone thought it was a ”phantom train”.
__________________

*) We have one ghost station, which was never finished because the area was never developed and instead made into a nature reserve.
 
Loren Coleman's "Curious Encounters" (which I foolishly gave away years ago) has a chapter on Ghost Trains. I was particularly struck with a story about a ghost train that doesn't stay on the tracks, but rushes off into the woods! THAT would be freaky!

Daniel Cohen's "Railway Ghosts and Highway Horrors" is a nice intro to the subject for younger readers.

Jim Brandon, in "Weird America," suggested that "monsters" are attracted to railways for some reason. That might just be because they make convenient pathways through the wilderness, or because they are utilized by potential witnesses.

Recently read "The Lost Special" by Conan Doyle. I liked the way he slipped Sherlock Holmes into this non-Holmesian tale!
 
A good fictional tale is "Downbound Train" about a carriage full of people who have done evil things and find themselves going through a landscape which transforms gradually into the plains of Hell. (It's a better read than it sounds, honest!) Can't recall the author.......!!

With regard to the tale of the boys chased through the forest by what could possibly have been a train in later years, were early Russian locos more like European or American ones? For some strange reason I've always found images of American locos to be more "alive", perhaps because of the "grinning" cow-catcher and the "eye" headlight. AFAIK European locos didn't have these features. (Go on trainspotters, put me right!)

I recall reading somewhere once that Red Indians couldn't see early trains because the symmetry of the engine and railway line was totally alien to them, they hadn't developed with heavy industry, it was thrust upon them already formed (Again, the way I've said it sounds a bit dodgy, like they had inferior brains or something, but it isn't meant to be!)
 
In Elliot O'Donnell's Casebook of Ghosts - volume II, there are two stories of ghost trains from America in the late 1890s, and one of a werewolf at a rural train station in England.

The caveat is, despite O'Donnell's claims that these are true stories, they have no sources and very much the feel of being completely fabricated.
 
LordRsmacker said:
For some strange reason I've always found images of American locos to be more "alive", perhaps because of the "grinning" cow-catcher and the "eye" headlight. AFAIK European locos didn't have these features. (Go on trainspotters, put me right!)
That's railway enthusiast, if you don't mind! Er, yes, you're right with the distinction. Apart from being much smaller than their American counterparts, European locos (British ones, at least) don't have the same sort of lighting - certainly not the giant spooky single lantern-type lights - or cow-catchers. Snowploughs, sometimes, but not cow-catchers! As for early Russian railways, they would generally have looked a bit Germanic.

LordRsmacker said:
I recall reading somewhere once that Red Indians couldn't see early trains because the symmetry of the engine and railway line was totally alien to them, they hadn't developed with heavy industry, it was thrust upon them already formed (Again, the way I've said it sounds a bit dodgy, like they had inferior brains or something, but it isn't meant to be!)
I recall reading something like that, possibly on this very forum. Wasn't it to do with the original inhabitants of Central America finding it literally impossible to see the ships in which the Spanish and Portuguese sailed, because they were so far outside their experience? It always sounded a bit dodgy to me, too! It sounds like a variation on Douglas Adams' SEP Field...
 
An idle thought, but the new(ish) carriages used on British railways are decidedly less spooky that the old fashioned compartments. The possibilities of being in a moving yet enclosed space are enormous.
 
Peripart said:
LordRsmacker said:
I recall reading somewhere once that Red Indians couldn't see early trains because the symmetry of the engine and railway line was totally alien to them...
I recall reading something like that, possibly on this very forum. Wasn't it to do with the original inhabitants of Central America finding it literally impossible to see the ships in which the Spanish and Portuguese sailed...
Yes - said thread is here.

Back OT (ish), I always thought that Russian trains had three lights at the front (or am I confusing Dr Zhivago with Murder on the Orient Express? They've both got trains and snow in them, and I've never watched either sober as they're always on at Xmas so easily could have conflated the two.)
 
It occurs to me now and then that as my home town is surrounded by railway tracks both above and under the ground, there could well be a few ghost trains knocking about unnoticed. :D

There's a centre for steam trains near here and in the very early morning I've sometimes heard an old-fashioned train whistle and even some distinctive steam-puffing. Beautiful sounds.
What if... ;)
 
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