Shadows in the Steam

by David Brandon

  Dickie o’ Tunstead is the name given to an ancient human skull which is kept at Tunstead Farm. Local legend says that it is the skull of one Ned Dixon, who was murdered by his cousin in the farmhouse. Any attempt to disturb it or particularly to move it out of the house will set in motion a series of accidents and even disasters which will only stop when the skull is restored or apparently reassured that no further disruption will take place. Nodding their heads sagely, the local wiseacres knew why the path of the line was altered. Dickie o’ Tunstead had made sure that it would.

  Legends of skulls that take umbrage when the even tenor of their lives is disrupted can also be found at Burton Agnes Hall in East Yorkshire and Bettiscombe Manor in Dorset.

  DORSET

  Bincombe Tunnel

  Weymouth was for a while almost the prototype of the fashionable as opposed to the popular English seaside resort. The town, which before the eighteenth century had largely been thought of as a decayed seaport, hit the headlines when in 1789 George III, no less, arrived, accompanied by the usual flock of medical advisers, bumptious officials and busybodies, court-followers, lounge lizards and toadies. The King was not a well man and he was in Weymouth to take advantage of the newly discovered therapeutic effects of sea-water. More specifically, he was there to bathe in the said water. After a few days breathing in the fresh sea air and viewing the sights, he allowed himself to be placed in a bathing machine and drawn out a short distance into the sea. He had squeezed himself into a costume which did little to hide the royal humps and bumps, and no sooner had he partially emerged to test the temperature of the water with his big toe than a band craftily hidden away in a nearby bathing machine struck up God save the King. They could scarcely have rendered the King’s first dip in the briny more public had they executed a 24-gun salute.

  A local for Weymouth drifts out of the southern entrance to Bincombe Tunnel, the next stop being the quaintly named Upwey Wishing Well Halt. The locomotive is a 45XX 2-6-2T

  These stirring events took place in 1789 and the King returned regularly to Weymouth until 1805, thereby guaranteeing the town pole position in the list of places that a certain class of person went in order to see and be seen. In the years that followed, however, other seaside resorts were busy copying Weymouth’s example. The railways played an important role in bringing the visitors on whom these places depended, and many of these resorts were much handier for London than far-distant Weymouth. By the 1840s Weymouth was well and truly in the doldrums and needed urgently to be connected to the country’s developing railway system. Southampton was joined to Dorchester naturally enough by the Southampton & Dorchester Railway in 1847. It was not until 1857, however, that its trains (having been taken over by the London & South Western Railway) could reach Weymouth by virtue of running powers over a line of the Great Western from Bristol, Bath, Frome and Yeovil. The GWR had reluctantly agreed to install mixed-gauge track, and the GWR and LSWR started their services to Weymouth on the same day. This at long last gave the town access to London, strangely enough right from the start, by means of two different routes.

  Bincombe Tunnel stands on the section of line between Dorchester and Weymouth where it passes on a steep gradient under Ridgeway Hill. Its involvement in the world of the possibly supernatural was short-lived. In 1991 several train drivers reported that while passing through the tunnel they had hit what was described as a ‘substantial object’. This experience was made all the more unnerving because they thought it was a human body, either of someone who had been unaware of the approaching train or a person bent on committing suicide. This of course would be a traumatic experience for the unfortunate drivers. British Transport Police investigated each report but found absolutely nothing that could explain what the drivers had seen. As abruptly as the sensations in Bincombe Tunnel started, so they finished.

  The line through Bincombe Tunnel is still operational.

  GLOUCESTERSHIRE

  Charfield

  Charfield was a wayside station on the Birmingham to Bristol main line of the former Midland Railway, situated to the north-east of Bristol. Early on the morning of 13 October 1928 a Wolverhampton to Bristol goods train was being shunted back off the main line to clear the way for a fast overnight mail train from Leeds to Bristol. This train overran signals and crashed into the reversing goods train, part of which was still fouling the main line. A freight train from the Bristol direction was slowly passing at the time, and the mail train locomotive, coming off the rails, crashed into it. Three trains were therefore involved. Exactly at the point of impact there was a low over-bridge, and the carriages of the mail train piled up under this bridge and immediately caught fire. If anything can be said to be fortunate about the accident it was that the mail train was carrying few passengers. Fifteen died. The fire raged for twelve hours.

  Among the dead were two children, a boy of about eleven and a girl perhaps two, maybe three, years younger. Although they were travelling together it seems that there was no adult accompanying them. This itself was rather odd because they were young to be travelling unaccompanied and especially at night. They had been observed by the fireman of the mail train chatting to the guard at Birmingham New Street. The fireman said that both children were well dressed and that the boy was wearing a school uniform. The guard was unable to add anything to this rather incomplete description of the children. He died in the fire. Those bodies recovered from the mail train were so badly burned that there was no chance of them being identified. They were buried in the local parish churchyard and the LMSR, successor to the Midland Railway, erected a memorial with the names of those buried close by. They obviously could not name the boy and girl. They are remembered on the memorial as ‘Two Unknown’.

  Three mysteries are associated with the tragedy of these two children. The first is that the LMSR initially denied that the children had been on the train and argued that they must have been trespassing on the line at Charfield and were caught up in the accident, simply a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fireman of the mail train refuted this, stating that he saw them board the train at New Street. Why should the LMSR have lied?

  Secondly there were some people who did not believe that the children or perhaps some of the other passengers were buried at Charfield at all but that their remains were spirited away by a military ambulance that was unaccountably present at the scene after the accident. No records exist as to why this vehicle was there. Thirdly, the death of two small children was obviously a tragedy. Why is it that no one ever came forward to say that they were the parents or guardians? Somebody presumably paid their fare at New Street and saw that they joined the right train. Someone else must have had the job of meeting them at their destination. They never came forward either. It was as if the children had never existed.

  Memorial in the churchyard to the victims of the Charfield accident.

  Some people claim that every year on the anniversary of the Charfield accident a woman in black is seen by the memorial in the churchyard. She looks grief-stricken and is generally reckoned to be the mother of the two unfortunate children.

  The route between Birmingham and Bristol was an amalgam of different schemes and was open throughout in the early 1840s. Charfield closed for passengers along with other small intermediate stations on the line in 1965, but the line is still operational.

  GREATER LONDON

  Addiscombe

  Addiscombe was the terminus of a service via London Bridge and New Cross from Cannon Street Station in the city. The line to Addiscombe itself was built by the South Eastern Railway and opened in 1864. Although, of course, the service was initially operated with steam trains, it became part of the Southern Railway’s expansive suburban network in the 1920s and a depot for electric multiple units was built where the old shed for steam locomotives used to be.

  The depot for the electrics quickly gained a reputation for being haunted. A catalogue of phenomena was recorded. The old electric carriages were of course o
f the ‘slam-door’ variety. It was the job of the staff at Addiscombe Station to ensure that all the passengers had got off the last trains of the night before they went to the depot for cleaning and maintenance. The electric units should therefore have been empty except for their crews when they snaked their way into the depot. Some nights were punctuated by the sound of compartment doors slamming as if dozens of passenger had woken up from their snoozes, panicked when they realised where they were and leapt out of the trains, slamming the doors behind them in their urgency to get away. The sound of invisibly slamming doors being slammed by equally invisible belated travellers had an understandably disturbing effect on the night-shift staff.

  When the trains came into the depot, the shoes picking up the current from the electric third rail would be isolated and, as a further precaution, the hand-brakes were screwed down. However, on many occasions members of staff relaxing over a mug of tea in the rest room would hear the sound of moving trains only to go outside and, as they expected, see that everything was just as it should be. The brake compressors which were isolated with all the rest of the electrical equipment would sometimes start making their rhythmic throbbing noise during the night even though no member of staff had been in the cabs of any of the units.

  A mysterious figure was often seen in the environs of the depot sometimes apparently supervising the shunting of the units into the right positions for their departure in the morning. On occasions the same or another figure would be seen approaching a member of staff. This apparition had a menacing bearing but it used to vanish before any member of staff could recognise its facial features. Was this the force that also sometimes invisibly opened and closed the tight-fitting door to the rest room?

  The depot had been the scene of a number of accidents leading to fatalities, and those who worked there reckoned that the ghost or ghosts were the spirits of these men whose lives were so tragically cut short.

  The old Addiscombe Station and the depot itself no longer exist. They were closed when the Croydon Tramlink opened in 2000. The tram station currently called Addiscombe is on a different site. What happened to the ghosts?

  GREATER MANCHESTER

  Ashton Moss

  There were three signal boxes at Ashton Moss. They were, respectively, Ashton Moss North Junction, Ashton Moss South Junction and OA&GB Junction. These initials stood for Oldham, Ashton & Guide Bridge Junction Railway, a line authorised in 1857 to join the oddly named station at Oldham Mumps to Ashton-under-Lyne and Guide Bridge. The railway network in this part of the eastern environs of Manchester was extremely complicated, the result of the wheeling and dealing, back-stabbing, outwitting and swindling which marked the activities of rival railway companies fighting for access to potentially lucrative traffic. This area associated especially with the cotton industry and coalmining seemed extremely promising. This manner of conducting business helps to explain the almost labyrinthine welter of lines that could once be found in many of Britain’s former manufacturing and mining areas.

  One day in early 1975, the signalman at OA&GB Junction was a little surprised to hear footsteps climbing the external wooden staircase to his box. Visits from other railway workers were by no means uncommon, platelayers and suchlike dropping in for a cup of tea, a smoke and a chinwag, but this was Saturday afternoon and these men would mostly be enjoying time away from work, perhaps at a football match. The signalman saw the figure of a man he did not think he recognised reaching the top of the stairway. The doors of signal boxes rightly had a notice stating ‘no admission’. Concentration was a vital part of a signalman’s duty and management frowned on the idea of other railway workers using signal boxes for social purposes. Their presence, even unintentionally, might distract the attention of the ‘bobby’, as signalmen were called. They were rightly even more disapproving of members of the public visiting signal boxes without official permission. Working in a signal box could be lonely and on those occasions when there was little traffic around, it could most certainly be boring. No wonder that those signalmen who were of gregarious nature often welcomed a visit – even if it was from someone they didn’t know who wanted to get an idea of how signalmen conducted their business.

  The signalman waited for a knock, and when that didn’t happen he walked across to the door and flung it open. There was no one there! The footsteps had been clearly audible coming up the steps; how could anyone have gone back down them in complete silence? Puzzled, the signalman descended and had a look around. He couldn’t go far in case his bells sounded and required a response, but as he climbed back up to his eyrie he was deeply perplexed. He had found nothing to suggest that there had been anyone in the vicinity, and yet he was convinced the footsteps had been real.

  The next Saturday he was working the same shift when, just as dusk was falling, he heard a noise down at track level in front of the box. He slid back the windows and thought he saw someone down on the track some distance away. He got on the circuit phone to his colleague at the neighbouring Ashton Moss Junction who said that he could also see what he thought was someone on the line. They both informed control and decided to leave their respective boxes and see if they could apprehend the person – a foolhardy trespasser perhaps, or maybe someone looking to steal line-side equipment. They found nothing.

  They were two sober, steady and conscientious men. They were convinced that someone had been down on the line, someone who apparently had the ability to disappear at will. Neither of the men had any time for the supernatural. We have to ask whether the figure was the ghost of a railwayman or someone else who had perhaps been killed on that stretch of line in some log-forgotten incident. The men never experienced the same phenomenon again.

  The only line past the former Ashton OA&GB Junction which is still operational is that from Manchester to Stalybridge, Huddersfield and Leeds. It carries passenger trains on a frequency that could not have been conceived of back in the 1970s.

  The uninspired access to Ashton-under-Lyne Station in the Greater Manchester suburbs.

  Bradley Fold

  Bradley Fold was an intermediate station on what became a through line owned by the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Co. This was an important route enabling trains from Merseyside to bypass Manchester from the north on their way to the West Riding of Yorkshire, and vice versa. The line also provided connections between a string of important intermediate towns such as Wigan, Bolton, Bury and Rochdale. The line through Bradley Fold opened to passenger and freight traffic in December 1848.

  Bradley Fold was three miles west of Bury and had the semi-industrial, semirural atmosphere common to much of this part of what was then Lancashire. A small community was gathered around a nearby cotton mill. The station possessed a level crossing. It enjoyed a reasonably generous service of local stopping trains in addition to a few passing expresses and many heavily laden freight and mineral trains. The flow of these latter trains meant that the signal box was manned continuously for twenty-four hours each weekday. Duty on the night shift, ten in the evening to six the following morning, meant a lonely vigil, and was definitely not for those who were blessed with too much imagination.

  To carry out the duties of a signalman effectively, concentration, alertness, scrupulous attention to the rules, a tidy mind and a systematic approach were absolute necessities. These qualities were displayed in plenty by a man who joined the railway in the 1950s after service in the Royal Navy. After training, he enjoyed his work, although he realised that it involved a very considerable burden of responsibility. One momentary lapse of concentration could lead to an appalling catastrophe. The man was naturally conscientious and made a good impression on the equally conscientious man alongside of whom he worked while he was undergoing training. The two of them recognised kindred spirits and became firm friends.

  The two men were frequently on alternate shifts and would often share a short overlapping period at the end and the beginning of their respective shifts when they would have a chat over a steaming mug of tea.
Our ex-Navy man had taken to his duties as if tailor-made for them, but it wasn’t long before he began to notice a degree of unease in his friend’s demeanour. This culminated in his friend telling him that he could stand it no longer and was leaving the job at the first available opportunity. Concerned but unwilling to intrude on his friend’s private thoughts, he wondered whether his friend had had any brushes with authority or any unpleasant experiences while at work. It was not unknown for vandals to find the windows of lonely signal boxes a tempting target even when they were manned. There was also coal and various copper and electrical fittings which provided temptation to the light-fingered fraternity. A signalman in such a lonely box could easily feel vulnerable.

  He was on duty one night and dealing with a succession of trains in the witching hours. All traffic movements had to be recorded in the signal box’s train register, and he was just about to make some entries when he heard the unmistakeable sound of footsteps crunching the ballast close to his box. He grabbed a torch, opened the door, descended to rail level and flashed the light hither and thither, but to no effect. There was no one there.

  Even a fairly stolid man would have been disconcerted to hear disembodied footfalls so close by, and he spent the rest of the shift trying unsuccessfully to make some sense of what he had heard. He returned to the box for his turn of duty the next night wondering whether his imagination had been playing tricks. At the same time in the early hours of the next morning he again heard the footsteps. By now he was aroused and determined to make sure that anybody out there playing at silly buggers wouldn’t do it again in a hurry. He grabbed a heavy poker and his torch and rushed down the steps. Again, nothing. Feeling indignation more than fear, he climbed back into the box and settled down, there being a gap in the procession of passing trains. Within a few minutes he heard a strange whistling noise apparently coming from outside the back of the box. Once more he took up poker and torch and descended to the track, absolutely sure that someone was taking liberties. He searched the area thoroughly but again found nothing.