Dovetail Games A Call For Railway Themed Ghost Stories!

Too long for a quick read, but a favourite from my youth...

The Old Powder Line: Amazon.co.uk: Parker, Richard: 9780840761705: Books

 

It's not a true story, definitely fiction, but a film based on a famous play by Arnold Ridley.
In 1941 they made a film version of "The Ghost Train", starring Arthur Askey.
It was mostly filmed on a studio set but some of the establishing shots were filmed on the Riviera Line around Dawlish Warren and Teignmouth.
A film very much of its time - as it was made during WW2 - but it's now in the public domain, so you can even watch it for free on Wikipedia of all places.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_Train_(1941_film)

 

If you want something scary railway-related, just look at germany. The amount of delays might knock you out.

 

The only one I can guarantee to be a nailed on classic is Charles Dickens' The Signal-man

The BBC 1976 adaptation with Denholm Elliott is also a pretty good watch, it came as one episode in a series called Ghost Stories For Christmas

 

Not strictly a ghost story, but this one and its sequels are about a young lad who discovers a bunch of live "OO" size people inhabiting his model railway layout!

The Model-Railway Men: 1: Amazon.co.uk: Pope, Ray, Pope, Mark, Floyd, Gareth: 9780995729117: Books

 

I remember reading years ago about a train in the Stockholm metro that stops at abandoned stations and disappears people who board it. That might be a good story to tell!

https://www.stockholmmuseum.com/stockholm-unveiled/transports/silverpilen.htm

 

There's probably more horror related stories around railways than ghost stories, though not suitable for a young audience. A few off the top of my head are:
Clive Barker's "Midnight Meat Train" which started out as a short story then got turned into a movie in 2008.
Creep was a horror movie with most of the action taking place on the London Underground.
And of course Quatermass and The Pit centres around the fictional station of Hobbs End, on an extension being built to the London Underground.
At least one of the Final Destination movies has the protagonists being involved in a Subway crash, when Tony Todd comes calling!

 

A suggestion from my side if I may...

Visit the abandoned Woodhaven Station on the LIRR 2.0 during the stream. It surely fits the scary vibes.

 

The Ghost Train that appears in Ghostbusters 2

 

The story of William Terriss and how he haunts the Covent Garden Tube Station is a pretty interesting one in my opinion.

 

This might be a good source for some true stories that will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. A documentary from 2005 about paranormal events and witness accounts on London Underground:



I've watched it about a dozen times and it still gives me the shivers whenever I rewatch it.

 

I got two for you, one is first hand, the other is one told to me. I'll start with mine, it's a two parter.

I started my footings in the rail industry as a freight conductor trainee, only for 3 months before I found my sweet spot doing track maintenance for a different company. While I was a conductor trainee, we worked a very remote subdivision along the America-Canada border, where you could go for miles and not see house for miles. The road job working it would leave one yard in America around 8pm and do a crew change at the border around midnight to continue on into Canada.

One night we left a little later because we had to help the yard crew for a bit. Most of it is 35-40mph track due to how hilly and forested the landscape is. We were rounding a curve that leads to a 2 mile straight around 11pm when I saw a red light about halfway down. Immediately told the engineer and both him and the other conductor confirmed they were seeing what I was seeing, and began to slow down the train, in case something was up.

As we inch our way up, I notice there's a silhouette in the shape of a person and the red light is a lantern bobbing up and down, walking down the roadbed off my side of the train. The silhouette is pitch black but also semi transparent, and no one uses red lanterns anymore. And mind you, the headlights on this loco can illuminate anything for 1.5 miles and we were about 500ft away from them. The trees down the embankment were unaffected by him, there was no shadow. Probably the freakiest part is when we finally crawled up to him at about 10mph, it didn't look up, and when I looked in the side mirror after we passed, I saw no facial features. The step lights didn't illuminate anything on him either. I told my engineer what I saw, and he said "Well, guess it's that time of year" and not to worry about it, he'd tell me more after we tie down the train. Rest of the night is quiet aside from calling out station signs and talking to the dispatcher for more limits.

We tie down the train and go into the bunk house. Inside, he tells me and the conductor that back in the 1910s there was a rough winter, and in the middle of a snowstorm, a brakeman climbed out a caboose to tie handbrakes on the roofs of boxcars during a snowstorm in the middle of the night. He slipped on ice on the running board and slid off the car, same curve we were rounding that night, rolling down the embankment, getting killed instantly hitting a tree. No one saw him fall off and the crew didn't realize he was missing until the train was already in Canada. His body wasn't recovered until spring came around because it got covered in snow. They say once or twice a year he makes an appearance, trying to follow his train, and seeing him is a sign to note.

This story is a double whammy for that reason.
Following that encounter, I had a reoccurring nightmare that an ATV was driving down the middle of the tracks while I was on a train behind it, and we couldn't stop in time. It wasn't every night, but it happened at least once a week. When I finally quit, I never had that nightmare again. And sure enough, within a week of leaving, a road job smacked an ATV that got stuck on the tracks. The guys with the ATV scattered well before the strike and no one got hurt, but I still believe that brakeman was warning me of what would come. Still gives me chills every time I write it out or I tell it in person.

 

Here's the one told to me. It's from an ex coworker that I did track work with.

Similar to the environment of the last railroad, it's very rural, there's multiple areas where you can go over 5 miles seeing only trees, logging roads, and more trees. From the 90s until the 2000s, the tracks were incredibly rough. Pull aparts were by the dozen, and track speed was only 15mph on the good spots. It's since changed.

Back then, usually a highrail truck would get joint authority with the road job, which just went from one yard to another and back all within the same night. They'd try to repair as many defects as they could behind the train before it came back through. Sometimes if the train crew could see something, they'd relay it via radio back to the maintenance crew as a heads up. One night, in one of those remote spots 5 miles in either direction from the nearest crossing while in the woods, the train radios them about two pull aparts in the middle of it, right rail, about three sticks (full size rail, 39ft) away from each other. This was during the winter, and since metal contracts so easily, it's no surprise they've already dealt with a few already that night. It gets below zero often up here.

Maintenance crew makes it to it and it's as dark as it can get outside, because there's no light pollution this far north. Only lights they have are the truck's and some weak head lamps. It's a cloudless night with a sky full of stars, and dead silent besides them. First rail gets taken care of easily, the train going over it dragged it up enough that they could just put new bolts in and it was good to go. Other one took some ingenuity to line up the holes (as in, it involved a chain tied to a bolt hole and the truck... real classy), but they got it. While they were wrenching up the bolts, both guys in the crew started to feel like they were being watched. The quietness of the forest set in, and they noticed there was no wind either.

Suddenly, the quiet is broken by the sound of glass shattering. They both stop wrenching and freeze, turn to each other and lock eyes for a split second before running back to the truck as fast as two guys in snow pants can. On the passenger side of the pickup truck, the window is shattered completely. On the driver's side, there's a rock that easily weighs 30 pounds sitting in the driver's seat. The driver rolls the rock out and they both jump in, leaving the wrenches and other track tools behind, and he punches it as fast as they can without derailing, and they set off at the next crossing. They head straight back to the office and call it a night, after driving there with the heat on the entire time.

Next day the roadmaster (their boss) gets a call from the foreman of the crew on what happened and the three of them go back to pick up the tools. There's a little bit of snow drifted on top of them from when the train came back through, but undamaged and right where they left them. There's footprints all around the tracks in the snow from the maintenance crew doing their repairs, and you can see where the truck was parked the night before based on where the footprints stopped. They spread out into the woods to see if there's any footprints thinking a logger was playing jokes on them, but they don't find any. No other prints. Not even from squirrels, birds, deer, or turkeys along the crust which is incredibly unusual. No sign of anyone except themselves and a giant rock. The rock is rolled further down the embankment and nothing is made of it.

End of story.

 

One from my neck of the woods down at the Bluebell! Apparently 75027 is haunted by an old fireman. As the post says apparently people have heard coal being shovelled into the firebox and no one was there!

https://www.facebook.com/share/1GsoWjdYFP/

 

Probably doesn’t count but the story of the Tay Bridge disaster in 1879 gives me chills. Visioning what happened. Also you can still see the remains of the first Tay Bridge to this very day…. I’d imagine it’s haunted. 59 lives were confirmed to have been lost.

Interestingly there have been reports of hearing screams and the sound of something crashing into the water and reports of a “phantom train” or hearing the sound of a train when there isn’t one nearby. That’s pretty eerie if true. Lol.

 

The film an American werewolf in London had some scary scenes on the underground if I recall ,ok not suitable for everyone but this thread made me myself remember it

 

something along the lines of 'Thomas meets the Adams family'?
Thomas gets up to mischief with Wednesday/needs to rescue Wednesday or vice versa/falls in love with Wednesday?

But there will be licensing issues, and we need new trains representing the family members, incl Lurch and Thing, which can be fun. Wednesday represented by a "Pug" tender loco in gothic disguise?

 

Setting aside there being plenty of alleged ghosts on the London Underground, two I always remembered after reading them online are;
37069 - supposedly haunted by a driver who was killed after a stone kicked up from a passing train (believe he was in the secondman's side) smashed through the window hit him on the head sometime in the 1960s. Since then, various drivers have reported the horn and fire bottles going off unexpectedly, a general feeling of not being alone in the cab, and a shadowy figure in a driving position. The locomotive still exists, owned by Europhoenix and in storage at Leicester.

Another famous one (since debunked) was 55020 "Nimbus" being spotted at Derby in 1992 - even though it was scrapped at Doncaster in 1980 (it was the first Deltic to be scrapped)

More of a superstitious thing but when the class 91s were refurbished, 100 was added to the locomotive number (91001 became 91101, etc), except for 91023, which became 91132. 91023 was the locomotive involved in both the IC225's major accidents - Hatfield and Great Heck.

This is a good thread if you can get past the squabbling over whether ghosts really exist
https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/are-our-railways-haunted-ghost-stories.27768/

 

not a ghost story
but from thinking about twilight zone and twilight express
i ended up here A Stop at Willoughby - Wikipedia

 

I remember reading about a Class 40 that was supposedly haunted.

 

Tram 101 in Blackpool was Haunted i believe. One that knocked over Rita in corrie

 

This was something that happened to me in August 2020 which I posted on Facebook. Copied and pasted.

Had an... Well odd is the word I'd use. Had an odd experience yesterday at Derby Station. Had bit of a spotting session there yesterday and it was bright and sunny and very hot. At no point was I chilly. However about half one I decided to head out to grab a bite to eat and get a drink. I decided to use the Subway to get from platform 5 to 1, As I was walking through it I was by myself at all times and yet I felt like someone was walking beside me. I got a very uneasy feeling and couldn't wait to get to the other side. As soon as I got to platform 1 the feeling passed straight away. Has there been any stories about the Subway or station?

 

There is a story of a 450 EMU being haunted. I don't know the unit number but while on test it had apparently been involved in a fatality sadly.

However some drivers have apparently seen the reflection of a woman sitting in the secondmans seat in the cab window.

 

Rothley station on the Great Central Railway in Leicestershire UK is reputedly haunted by several ghosts including a former station master.

 

I believe that's 450101

 

Here's one.

The Last Train from Paddington
The 23:47 to Bristol Temple Meads was always quiet, but tonight it was practically deserted. Sarah hurried through Paddington Station, her heels echoing against the Victorian ironwork overhead. She'd missed the earlier train after her shift at the hospital ran late, and now the vast station felt wrong—too empty, too quiet for London.

She found her carriage and slumped into a seat, grateful to be out of the November rain. The fluorescent lights flickered as the train pulled away, and through the rain-streaked windows, London's suburbs began their slow fade into darkness.

At Reading, a man in an outdated BR uniform got on. Sarah barely glanced up from her phone until she realized something odd—his uniform was pristine, like it had just been pressed, but the style was decades out of date. British Rail hadn't existed since the nineties.

He walked past her without acknowledgment, his footsteps making no sound.

Her phone lost signal. The carriage lights dimmed.

At Didcot Parkway, more passengers boarded. A woman in a 1960s coat, pearls at her throat. Two children in school uniforms that looked like something from a heritage photograph. A businessman with a briefcase, his suit sharp but wrong somehow—cut in a style she couldn't quite place.

None of them spoke. None of them looked at her.

Sarah's breath caught when she noticed their tickets—they were checking them repeatedly, compulsively, even though no conductor had come. The tickets were the old card-stock type, hole-punched, with "British Rail" printed across the top.

The train didn't stop at Swindon. They flew through the darkened station at full speed, though Sarah could have sworn the schedule showed a stop there. Outside, the darkness was absolute now, not even motorway lights visible.

She stood, meaning to move to another carriage, to find someone real, someone who would look at her. But when she reached the connecting door, she saw them. Every carriage was full now, hundreds of passengers in clothes from different decades, all silent, all checking their tickets with that same mechanical gesture.

The woman in pearls turned to look at her then. Her eyes were hollow.

"Sit down," she said, her voice like wind through a tunnel. "We're nearly there."

"Where?" Sarah whispered.

"The end of the line."

Sarah grabbed the emergency handle and pulled. Nothing happened. She yanked again, panic rising in her throat. The handle came away in her hand, rusted and brittle despite looking solid moments before.

The train began to slow.

Through the window, Sarah could see a station emerging from the fog—but it was wrong, derelict, covered in ivy. The platform was cracked, the waiting room windows dark and broken. The sign read "Temple Meads," but this wasn't any station she recognized.

The passengers stood as one.

"Your ticket," the man in the BR uniform said, appearing beside her. His breath smelled of smoke and old paper.

"I don't have a paper ticket—it's on my app—"

"Then you can't leave."

The doors opened with a hiss. The passengers filed out onto the crumbling platform and simply... faded, dissolving into the fog like steam.

Only Sarah remained, frozen in her seat.

The doors closed. The train began to move again, heading into a tunnel that shouldn't exist, deeper and deeper into darkness. The carriage lights went out completely.

Her phone screen cast the only light now. 00:00, it read. No signal. No apps. Just a reflection of her terrified face in the black glass.

And in that reflection, standing behind her, she could see them all—every passenger, pressed close, their hollow eyes watching, waiting.

The train never stopped.

When Sarah's mother reported her missing, British Transport Police checked the CCTV. The footage showed Sarah boarding the 23:47 at Paddington. But the train that pulled in on that platform hadn't been scheduled. In fact, according to records, there was no train at all.

The 23:47 to Bristol Temple Meads doesn't exist. It was discontinued in 1987 after a signal failure caused it to vanish one November night with all souls aboard.

They say it still runs on schedule, though. Still stops at Reading and Didcot Parkway. Still looking for passengers who've missed their connections.

Still looking for tickets it can punch.

 

Oh, no biggie... We've all been there...
Selecting the Diesel Legends timetable instead of the Great Western one !

 

I'm guessing the other spooky train would be the Hogwart's Express from Harry Potter, but probably a minefield of licencing and permissions to climb even to mention it on a stream let alone put in the game.

 

How's Hogwarts Express a spooky train ?
I mean apart from carrying monsters in the luggage van and that one time being boarded by the Dementors ( which is close enough to an average day on the New York City Subway )

 

Legend has it, that a ghostly sound of a 104 can be heard reverberating around the hills and valleys of the Peak District.

 

It was just a thought… However there are supernatural elements around the operation of the train, whether departing from Platform 9.75 at Kings Cross and somehow traversing the rail network without encountering any other trains. It cannot have any electrical systems as, from canon in the books, electricity cannot function around concentrated magic. Lupin is able to teleport on to the footplate in the third book and movie to, “Have a word with the driver.”

 

And if the wind is right and the stars shine bright, over the hills you can hear echoing "Itsontheroadmapitsontheroadmapitsontheroadmap"

 

Or....it's in testing,or I don't know I'll ask them tomorrow lol

 

The real chilling story this Halloween is “bLuRrY tExTuReS oN cOnSoLeS”.

 

I've got a first hand one.

I work as a signalling technician on the Liverpool St to Norwich line, I was working with a colleague one night in a steep incline cutting. We had to split up to carry out a particular job, he stayed near the station and I walked out into the fog to find the end of the equipment. While working inside the location case, I heard footsteps in the ballast and assumed my colleage had walked up to find me as phone signal is poor in the cutting, but couldn't see any headtorch light.
Thinking nothing of it, as the area is common with deer and foxes, I went back to work. But the footsteps soon started again, looking back up, I couldn't see any light or reflective clothing, but this time, I saw the ballast moving, crunch, crunch, crunch... and stop, about 5ft away from me.
Seconds that feel like hours pass, and then behind me, the unmistakable crunch of ballast underfoot continues.. as the eerie footsteps move away back into the fog.

The cutting is infamous for an accident that occured in the 1850's when 7 people were killed by a runaway wagon while working in thick fog.

I figured one of the unlucky ones has been doomed to repeat that illfated patrol.

 

Appreciate not railway related, but we had a bus at work felt like it was haunted (doubt it was). Was running empty back to depot at night and the stop bells were going off and the interior lights flickered. Less than 6 months after, it was involved in a fatal RTA.

Spoiler: Explanation

Most likely just dodgy wiring and co-incidence, but it was the first time I've been properly spooked; floored it back to the depot

 

YouTube video about Stockholm “Silver Arrow” the subway train that became a ghost legend and the unfinished station becoming a ghost station. Part one should fit your request.

Here is a Wikipedia text for you to dramatise yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Train_of_Stockholm

 

I occasionally hear a train horn despite there not being a line through here no more. It's probably just from the mainline being carried over when conditions are favourable, but it's fun to imagine its a ghost train coming down the old mine railway (even though none of it is left)
(Or maybe its just that moron van driver with a stupid aftermarket horn that sounds like a train...)

 

The train station scene at the end of the woman in black is pretty chilling!

 

Here’s one by AmtrakGuy365 that I found last year about a tunnel in the Hoosac Mountains in Massachusetts nicknamed “The Blood Pit”. Quite interesting..

 

'Underground' by J.B. Priestly is a good one. Set in 1973 on a Northern Line train going north to Hendon, things go hellishly wrong as it passes through Central London...

 

Found this Train of Thought Video about the nicknamed “Death Car” for Nickel Plate Road Coach #62

 

I can't find anything about that novel online

 

https://www.theretirees.co.uk/PDF/Clayton Tunnel.pdf

Can't be bothered to type it all so here is a PDF