Shadows in the Steam

by David Brandon

  The line through Bramhope Tunnel is still operational.

  Wakefield Kirkgate

  The railway history of the Wakefield area is extremely complicated so suffice it to say that, of the city’s two stations, this one was under the joint ownership of the Lancashire & Yorkshire and the Great Northern railway companies. It opened for business in 1857.

  The memorial in Otley to the victims of the building of Bramhope Tunnel.

  The Navvies’ Memorial. Local children used to dare each other to crawl through – the ghosts of the navvies might get them!

  Even the frontage of Wakefield Kirkgate Station is hardly an advert for rail travel.

  Kirkgate Station, in my opinion, is an absolute disgrace. It was once an impressive and busy station with an overall roof. Many passenger trains were to be seen, there were extensive carriage and goods sidings and a real sense of bustle. Now the place is a largely empty, echoing, run-down husk which gives all the wrong impressions about travelling by rail in the twenty-first century. Such is its state of neglect that it might almost be described as a ‘ghost station’. It is certainly not the kind of place anyone would want to hang about in, and it is therefore somewhat surprising that it has a ghost who has been seen on many occasions. She takes the form of a lady in clothes of the Victorian period and, although she has been seen in various parts of the station, she seems to prefer to lurk in the dingy subway. Perhaps she is waiting for better times. It may be a long wait.

  Yeadon

  Yeadon is best known today for being the location of the airport serving Leeds and Bradford, but for some years it was the terminus of a now largely forgotten railway, just one and a half miles long. In the 1880s a proposal was made for a branch from Guiseley on the Leeds and Bradford to the Ilkley line of the Midland Railway to Yeadon. The company making this proposal was the Guiseley, Yeadon & Rawdon Railway, and it got delusions of grandeur that it would extend beyond Yeadon to serve other places in the West Riding. These hopes came to nothing and the short branch was taken over by the Midland Railway and opened in 1894. This curious little line never had a regular passenger service, was closed temporarily in 1944 as a wartime economy, reopened and then closed permanently in 1964.

  Very occasional excursion trains ran on the Yeadon branch, and it was one of these that constituted a ghost train of sorts. The year was 1930 and the LMSR had offered a day excursion from Yeadon to Morecambe. The draw of Morecambe proved irresistible (how could it have been otherwise?) and the train was fully booked. A large crowd of well-wishers turned out to see the train off early in the morning on its scenic route via Ilkley, Skipton, Hellifield and Carnforth. A big crowd of friends, relations and others turned out eager to witness its return. After all, a passenger train at Yeadon was a rare event. The time for its arrival came and went. No one thought anything of a delay of ten minutes or perhaps half-an-hour but when an hour had passed people began to become restless and irritated. After ninety minutes a degree of concern began to spread, but people were helpless because no members of the railway staff were on hand at Yeadon. Rumours began to spread with the quite remarkable speed they often display in such situations. As always, those who knew least said most. Soon theories were circulating that there had been a derailment, a crash or some other catastrophe, and the more suggestive in the crowd began to fear for their kith and kin.

  The cause of the problem was an oversight on the part of the LMSR. The line to Yeadon was heavily graded and a pilot engine was required to assist the train engine up to the terminus. They had forgotten to provide a pilot and the train had stopped at Guiseley while attempts were made to rustle up an additional engine from somewhere. These efforts were fruitless and so the harassed staff at Guiseley had little option but to ask everyone on board to alight and to walk the lanes and field paths back to home and hearth. Naturally many passengers were outraged and let their feelings be known. There were many babies on the train and they were getting fractious, as were the children who were now dogtired after a day of excitement. As usual, the managers whose incompetence was responsible for the failure to provide the pilot engine were many miles away and it was the ordinary railway workers at Guiseley who had to bear the brunt of the justifiable wrath of the frustrated excursionists. However, in dribs and drabs they set off for Yeadon on foot, grumbling as they went and swearing that they would never have anything to do with the railway in the future.

  Not surprisingly, the Morecambe excursion became known locally as the ‘Ghost Train’ – the train that went but never came back.

  WILTSHIRE

  Box Tunnel

  Box Tunnel was perhaps the major engineering feature on the London to Bristol route of what became the Great Western Railway. It is one of Britain’s most impressive railway tunnels and was the work of the immortal Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–59). If ever there was a man with a sense of theatre, it was Brunel. Here he built a tunnel which, with its classical portals, was designed to show how engineering and art could be combined in making a dramatic addition to the landscape. It is 3,212 yards long and built on a descending gradient of 1 in 100 going westwards towards Bath and Bristol. Those whose sole purpose in life seems to have been the forecasting of doom and gloom said that if the brakes failed on a train entering the eastern end, it would emerge from the western, that is, the lower end, at a speed of 120 mph, a velocity which would suffocate all the passengers. Others with equally avid relish argued that that such a long tunnel would inevitably collapse and crush a train passing through with a horrible death for all those on board. Fortunately neither of these melodramatic scenarios actually occurred.

  However, the building of the tunnel was a project of heroic proportions. The tunnel had to be bored through solid rock, and so daunting a prospect was this that it was difficult to find contractors prepared to take the job on. The rock had to be broken with gunpowder before the miners could tackle it with picks. It was hot, damp, dark and unventilated; a nightmare scene. The workings were constantly flooded and quicksands were encountered. The spoil had to be winched up the construction shafts to the surface and the men got to their place of work by being winched down the shafts in baskets. It is hardly surprising that over 100 men lost their lives during the five years it took to build the tunnel. It opened without ceremony on 30 June 1841.

  With so much drama and tragedy accompanying the building of the tunnel, it is hardly surprising that Box has attracted tales of the supernatural. Right from the start, the drivers of locomotives passing through the tunnel claim to have seen figures on the track, often silhouetted against the light at the tunnel mouth. Maintenance men whose job it is to walk the tunnel also report seeing spectral presences and some have gone so far as to describe them as looking like nineteenth-century labourers. The sound of steam-hauled trains passing through the tunnel long after regular steam ended on the Western Region of British Railways has been heard on many occasions. Equally puzzling is the sound of trains passing through the tunnel at times when it has been closed to all traffic for maintenance purposes.

  A persistent legend attached to Box Tunnel is that Brunel designed the tunnel so that an observer standing at its western entrance on 9 April, his birthday, and looking through the straight bore, would be able to see the sun rising in the east and casting its rays through the entire length of the tunnel. This has always been taken as evidence of Brunel’s engineering genius and sense of the dramatic. Unfortunately, it is not true.

  By way of a footnote, Great Western Railway signal boxes sported a rather attractive cast-iron plate on the front of the building which told the world the signal box’s name. That at the nearby Box Station was succinct and symmetrical. It simply said ‘Box Signal Box’. The line through the tunnel is still operational.

  The western portal of Box Tunnel, designed in elegant style by I.K. Brunel. The tracks here were originally broad gauge.

  Monkton Farleigh Mine

  A short distance south-west of Box, under the hill on which the stumpy little curiosity kno
wn as ‘Brown’s Folly’ stands, lies what for decades was one of Britain’s best-kept secrets. Those who knew of its existence were required by the Official Secrets Act not to reveal this information to anyone. It was virtually an underground city. It covered 80 acres and was possibly the largest underground ammunition dump in the world!

  This mysterious place was located in the long defunct Monkton Farleigh stone mine. The labyrinth of caves under the hill was identified by the Government in the 1930s as having the potential for use in wartime as a storage point for ammunition and/or other war supplies. A decision was reached to utilise the existing warren of caves and to create large extensions to the complex which would allow the storage of huge quantities of potentially volatile material deep below ground where the temperature and humidity would be more-or-less constant. The place provided the ideal conditions for an ammunition dump. A great advantage was that the proposed site in the erstwhile mine stood close to the main line from Swindon to Bath and Bristol, owned by the then Great Western Railway, and so the necessarily heavy, awkward and dangerous materials could be transported in and out by rail. Exchange sidings were built connecting it with a narrow-gauge railway system penetrating into the hillside.

  Some people believe that the ghost of Brunel returns to this example of his engineering genius, Box Tunnel.

  A hugely expensive building project was put into effect, costing billions of pounds by today’s standards. The complex even had its own medical centre and power station. It is estimated that 7,500 men were employed on the construction works, but only comparatively small numbers of men at any one particular time so that none of them were able to gain an overall view of what the entire project involved. Secrecy and security were maintained at the highest possible level while the work was going on and even more so once hostilities had commenced. A large workforce was in place during the war consisting largely of forces personnel but also considerable numbers of civilians, and again security requirements saw to it that each worker on the site was restricted just to his or her department and not permitted to enter other parts of the establishment. Patrols and pillboxes made it inadvisable for strangers, innocent or otherwise, to get too close.

  Every effort was made to try to ensure the maximum possible safety on the site. All sorts of rumours circulated in the surrounding towns and villages about what exactly was going on at Monkton Farleigh and inevitably, once the Second World War started, it became widely but unofficially known that explosives were stored there. The locals might well have had reason to protest had they known that at the peak there were over 12 million shells being stored. A major explosion would have taken Box, Bathford and much of Bath itself with it.

  In the late 1970s a museum was created in the then long disused underground complex, but somehow it did not seem to catch on and it closed within a few years. All is peaceful in the Monkton Farleigh area now but traces of the former activities can be found by the determined rambler around OS grid reference 800675. No ghosts have been reported associated with the mine but there is something undeniably eerie about this onetime hive of sinister activity and of any remaining relics associated with it. Also eerie is the idea of ‘ghost trains’ despatched from elsewhere to this destination ‘somewhere in southern England’ and which it was an offence to photograph let alone ask about. Despatching trains across Britain required locomotives, train-crew and rolling stock being provided for them, timetable paths being created, even wagon labels being written up and the progress of the train being carefully monitored from signal box to signal box as it proceeded on its way. The operation of these trains must have been an open secret, yet their existence was officially denied. Ghost trains, indeed, which ran to officially secret sidings where their contents was transhipped into equally secret narrow-gauge wagons and moved into a place that didn’t exist.

  Headstones in Bromsgrove churchyard remembering those employed by the Birmingham & Gloucester Railway who were killed when the boiler of their locomotive exploded in November 1840. The ghosts of Driver Rutherford and Fireman Scaife are thought to rise from their graves from time to time.

  WALES

  Saltney Ferry

  Saltney Ferry (Mold Junction) Station served passenger trains on the line from Chester to Mold and Denbigh. About three and a half miles west of Chester, it stood next to a motive power depot, which was a posh name for a place where locomotives were housed – in other words, an ‘engine shed’. This shed went by the name of Mold Junction and the platform at Saltney Ferry provided a good place for trainspotters to take the numbers of the locomotives housed there or just visiting. The Saltney district became an important one, from the railway point of view, with the engine shed, two stations, engineering workshops, a branch line down to wharves on the River Dee and two marshalling yards. Railways, until the run-down of freight and mineral traffic and the modernisation from the 1960s, were highly labour intensive and a substantial amount of property in the Saltney district was given over to housing railway workers and their families.

  The area around Saltney Ferry Station was said to have been haunted by the ghost of an old man seen – but more often heard – pedalling around the area on a rusty bicycle with a notable squeak and a spookily flickering lamp. He did this during the witching hours of early morning darkness, and was spotted over the years by a number of railwaymen going to and from work on shifts involving anti-social hours. It was thought that he was the ghost of a man who had hanged himself in one of the railway buildings at Saltney.

  Saltney Ferry Station closed in 1962 when passenger services were withdrawn between Chester and Denbigh. Mold Junction shed closed in 1966 and the marshalling yards were also run down and finally closed. There is little to tell the visitor of the past importance of Saltney in the history of the railways of Chester and North Wales. However, on the opposite side of the Crewe to Holyhead main line, which is still operational, stands a rather gaunt building which was a hostel for railway workers and which has now been converted into flats.

  More surprisingly, Mold Junction engine shed survives. It is semi-derelict but houses part of a scrap yard. For those who have fond memories of engine sheds, it is still instantly recognisable for what it was, despite over forty years having passed since the sad occasion on which the last steam locomotive clanked away for work elsewhere or to meet its fate, cut up as so many of them were and the metal of which they were composed reprocessed for use as razor blades.

  Mold Junction shed is indeed a place of ghosts.

  Talybont-on-Usk

  Brecon was a small but important town situated on the River Usk in which by the 1840s the business community felt was being held back by not being located on a railway. Local landowners and commercial interests therefore decided to sponsor a line south to Dowlais and Merthyr from where access would be possible to the whole of industrial and mining South Wales and particularly Newport, forty-seven miles away. The Brecon & Merthyr Tydfil Railway opened in 1863 from Brecon to Pant, and finally to Dowlais in 1869. It was a line with fearsome gradients as it drove southwards through the heart of the Brecon Beacons. Over six miles were on a gradient of 1 in 38 to a summit at Torpantau of 1,313ft above sea level. Coming northwards, Torpantau was reached via a gruelling climb at 1 in 47.

  Talybont-on-Usk was a wayside station about seven miles south of Brecon. The line closed in 1962 and the station was eventually converted into an Outdoor Adventure Centre. The story goes that a party of schoolchildren were asleep one night in a dormitory when they were suddenly woken up by the sound of a steam train followed by crashing noises and screams. It was only in the morning that the children who all thought it had been a lark found out that there had been a railway accident at Talybont many years earlier and that perhaps the noise they heard was a ghostly reconstruction. There was indeed a fatal accident in 1878 and this had led to the development of a legend of a ghost train passing along the formation of the old railway, usually around ten past nine when the accident occurred.

  SCOTLAND


  Auldearn

  Auldearn is a small village which possesses a very fine seventeenth-century dovecote, or doocot as they call them in these parts. Three miles east is the Hardmuir, a stretch of woodland which is thought to be the scene for the encounter of Macbeth and Banquo with the witches.

  It is therefore entirely appropriate that Auldearn was the scene for the most remarkable of all Scottish witchcraft trials. This took place in 1662. Even without being tortured, the victim, a young girl, confessed to taking part in a series of bizarre rites. At her trial she confirmed most of the popular beliefs about witches – that their meetings were in covens numbering thirteen, they attended baptisms at which the Devil officiated and enjoyed satanic orgies in the woods. She admitted that she and her companions mounted straws, recited a spell and then rode around on the straws, transforming themselves at will into cats, hares and jackdaws. She went on to describe in lurid detail how the Auldearn coven had murdered the children of a local landowner. She related with gory relish how they had made clay effigies of the children and then thrust these into a fire thereby causing the children to die slow and extremely painful deaths. She also admitted to being on intimate terms with the Devil himself. She seems happily to have put herself in the frame for being a witch and a murderer, but there is no historical record of her fate. It is unlikely that she was presented with the freedom of Auldearn and more likely that she was burnt at the stake.