Shadows in the Steam Read online

  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 t
he 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.