Shadows in the Steam

by David Brandon

  This caveat not withstanding, Dundee was en fête. Bouch was the hero of the day, fit to stand in the pantheon of British heroes alongside the likes of Drake, the Duke of Marlborough and Nelson. Bathing in this popular adulation, Bouch was already engaged in preliminary work for a bridge across the Firth of Forth to replace the Granton to Burntisland ferry. The Queen visited Dundee, took a trip across the bridge and knighted Bouch. On that day the city’s schoolchildren were given a day off, and the dear little weans were soon sinking their fangs into ‘Tay Bridge Rock’, each and every one of them having been presented with this sticky sweetmeat as a memento of the occasion. As sweetmeats they were greatly appreciated. As souvenirs, they were a complete failure.

  It was soon obvious that not all was well with the bridge. Trains were crossing it at speeds considerably in excess of the prescribed 25mph, maintenance men were noticing a disconcerting number of bolts and rivets which had worked loose, and they also talked about the excessive vibration which occurred when trains passed over the bridge, especially if they were going too fast.

  On Sunday 28 December 1879 an appalling storm was causing structural damage in Dundee and whipping the waters of the Tay into waves that hit the piers of the bridge with sufficient force to produce spray and spindrift that the wind flung over the trains far above. It was truly a terrifying tempest. The awesome power of the wind brought people out to gaze at the churned-up waters of the Tay, and all averred they had never seen a storm like it. The bridge was still a major talking-point with Dundonians and inevitably people watched with fascination as the last trains of the day made their way across. Sparks and flashes were to be seen as the trains moved through the ‘High Girders’. Perhaps they were red-hot coals from the locomotives’ fireboxes. It became evident later that the cause of at least some of them was the friction created on the wheel flanges and on the rails when the trains were hit by especially powerful gusts as they were passing through the ‘High Girders’.

  The very last train of the day was the 5.20 p.m. from Burntisland, and several people were watching its progress across the bridge when there was a sudden flurry of flashes just as the moon emerged and suffused the firth in silvery light. To their horror, the watchers saw that there was a breach in the High Girders. The bridge was down!

  The train had been hit by an extra-strong gust of wind, perhaps as much as 110mph, when it was within the girders, a section of which was dislodged, whereupon it fell into the icy waters below. All the seventy-five passengers thought to be on board drowned and the bodies of twenty-nine of them were never recovered. The train stayed remarkably intact, having been protected from damage by the ironwork of the girders themselves. The locomotive was a 4-4-0, North British No.224, and she was so little damaged by her submarine adventure that she was recovered, repaired and returned to traffic. However, she never ventured across the Tay Bridge after it was rebuilt. The North British Co. thought it sensible to roster No.224 for duties elsewhere. Besides, it was quite possible that superstitious footplatemen would refuse to work it over the bridge as it was thought of as a ‘jinxed’ locomotive, although only in that particular location. Its exploits earned it the nickname ‘The Diver’.

  Ever since that fateful night at the end of 1879, people on the anniversary claim to have seen a ghostly steam train crossing the bridge from the Fife end and suddenly disappearing from sight with sparks and flashes galore. This kind of supernatural experience is often referred to as a re-enactment haunting and is not uncommon where events involving extreme emotions have taken place. A dispassionate view would be that such a thing was simply impossible. However, there has been a constant procession of people who have come forward claiming to have seen this spectral train on the night in question.

  The Tay Bridge shortly after it opened. The ‘High Girders’ which collapsed, carrying the train with them, can be seen.

  The ‘High Girders’ have gone!

  A view of the missing section of Tay Bridge.

  Sir Thomas Bouch bore the brunt of the criticism for the collapse of the Tay Bridge. Revisionist historians think he was made a scapegoat. This is his memorial in Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh.

  More static ghosts are some of the piers of Bouch’s ill-fated bridge, many of which can still be seen from the Fife or southern shore protruding from the river and alongside the replacement bridge.

  The Waverley Route

  Without a doubt one of Britain’s most fabled main lines was the Waverley Route, so-called because the line passed near Abbotsford, the home of the once very popular novelist, Sir Walter Scott. His prolific output of loosely historical novels had started with Waverley, published in 1814. It would not be unfair to say that this line has generated an interest out of all proportion to its former importance as a part of the country’s railway network. Perhaps its fascination is wrapped up with the nature of the terrain it traversed. Once it was beyond the outer environs of Edinburgh, the route passed through largely empty and remote countryside and through hills whose gradients provided a stern test for the mettle of locomotives and footplatemen. With good reason the local drivers and firemen called it ‘The Long Line’.

  Also, this was once the territory of the Border Reivers. These were the people who, 400 years ago and less, gave the world a preview of organised gangsterism as they roamed the bleak countryside feuding, raiding, extorting and engaging in family vendettas and almost always doing so with complete immunity from authority. Something of the emotionally charged atmosphere their activities created still clings to the windswept fells and dales of this beautiful but harsh countryside. A few miles from the line and not far from the present Hawick to Newcastleton road stands Hermitage Castle. Is there any equally desolate spot in Britain containing such a sinister-looking building? Hermitage was associated with Lord Soulis, a fiend in human form capable of every form of atrocity and wickedness. His activities were recalled in verse, a fragment of which gives a flavour:

  The axe he bears, it hacks and tears,

  ‘Tis form’d of an earth-fast flint;

  No armour of knight, tho’ ever so wight,

  Can bear its deadly dint.

  No danger he fears, for a charmed sword he wears,

  Of adderstone the hilt:

  No Tynedale knight had ever such might,

  But his heart-blood was spilt.

  The origins of the line date back to 1845 when the North British Railway Co. obtained powers to build a line from Edinburgh to Hawick, and this opened in 1849. The hills through which the line passed supported vast numbers of sheep. The pure water which tumbled off the fells was excellent for processing the raw wool which was then worked up in towns like Galashiels and Hawick into high-quality material generically known as ‘tweed’. The North British saw good business in supporting the expansion of the woollen industry in this area not least by being able to bring in cheap coal from the Lothian coalfield to power the mill furnaces.

  By the time the line had reached Hawick, that town was no longer the ultimate goal. The North British now had Carlisle in its sights. There was an awful lot of barren moorland in the forty-three miles from Hawick to Carlisle, with heavy engineering works and little possibility of much intermediate originating traffic. The border city was only reached in 1862 and the southern end was a financial liability, built like a main line but only earning frugal branch line revenue until 1876.

  In that year the English-based Midland Railway reached Carlisle with its own independent line from Settle and Leeds. There was little love lost between the North British and Midland railway companies serving Carlisle on the one hand and the Caledonian and London & North Western companies on the other. The former companies now had between them a through route from Edinburgh to London (St Pancras) via Leeds. The Midland had an arrangement with the Glasgow & South Western Railway Co. whereby traffic from Glasgow via Kilmarnock and Dumfries could also be channelled via the Settle and Carlisle line to Leeds, the East Midlands and London. This meant that the Waverley route now became part of
a trunk Anglo-Scottish facility, and so it assumed a new identity as an important main line.

  The dramatic countryside through which the Waverley route passes has for long attracted railway photographers. Early in the 1950s one such photographer decided to spend a day in the vicinity of Shankend. This had a minor and ill-frequented station just south of Hawick, and at one time a fine mansion had stood on the hillside overlooking the line. By this time it had been abandoned and was a derelict and forbidding hulk surrounded by policies which had become wild and overgrown. Wherever you were in the Shankend area, somehow it was impossible to ignore the presence of this brooding relic.

  The photographer was an old hand, well-used to carting his equipment across fields and through thickets in his search for the best lineside locations, but Shankend was new to him. This time it wasn’t impenetrable brambles or fast-flowing streams that put him off but a horribly threatening sense of an unseen malignant presence. So real was the apprehension that he felt, even on this sunny summer’s day, that he decided to leave without having taken even a single picture. He could not help thinking that if the place was so threatening on a day like that, it could only be a thousand times more so on a grey and gloomy November afternoon. What would it be like in the witching hours?

  Later he talked to fellow railway photographers and those who had been to the Shankend area all agreed that there was indeed something horrible about the atmosphere there. Two of them said that they would never return. Enquiries established that the big house had been requisitioned for use as a prisoner-of-war camp during the First World War. The inmates suffered an appalling visitation of typhoid, sometimes called ‘gaol fever’, and the victims had been buried in graves scattered around the policies close to the house. When the war was over the house was put out to rent, but those who moved in quickly moved out. The place got a bad name, became hard to let and eventually was left vacant and fell into disrepair. Was it the ghosts of the POWs that exuded the air of menace around Shankend?

  It may well have been the presence of the same former prisoner-of-war camp that spoiled the efforts of a well-known recorder of railway sounds. Trains worked hard up the gradient near Shankend and made an ideal subject for sound recording. The recorder stood close to the lineside, having found what he thought was the ideal spot. His hobby required patience and fortitude but as he waited in the dark he knew it was wise not to allow his imagination too full a rein in a spot as bleak and remote as this. At last he heard a distant lonesome whistle and the sound of a labouring locomotive which heralded the approach of a suitable subject for a recording. He got his equipment ready when he became aware of strange, rather eerie noises coming from a nearby copse. A trifle put out but not daunted by this unwelcome sound, he tried to switch the recorder on but one of the tapes jammed just at the critical moment. The train heaved itself up the hill, approaching and then passing with a crescendo of just the kind of sounds he wanted to record for posterity. He fiddled impotently with his recorder but it was no good. That was one train that got away. Somewhat mortified, he decided to call it a day. As the sound of the hard-working engine reverberated from the surrounding hills and gradually faded away, he became aware that it was as black as Newgate Knocker, that he was very much alone and there had been those strange sounds coming from somewhere close by. Fortunately they had stopped, but it had suddenly become colder.

  He was clearly a man of resource, however, because early next morning he returned to the same location, not to do any recording but to investigate the little wood from which the unnerving sounds had come. Under the trees were small iron markers recording the burial places of Germans who had died in the typhoid outbreak at the nearby prison camp.

  One of the most extraordinary places on the Waverley Route was Riccarton Junction, not very far south of Shankend, where the route met a line known as the Border Counties Railway, which had opened at the same time. This railway backwater meandered southwards through hopelessly empty country with few settlements of any size until it reached the valley of the North Tyne. At Hexham it joined up with the North Eastern Railway’s Newcastle–Carlisle line.

  Riccarton Junction was an exceptionally desolate and isolated spot on an exposed hillside about fifteen miles south of Hawick and a considerable distance from any road. For that reason Riccarton Junction was totally dependent on the railway for its communications with the outside world. The community there had been created by the North British Railway as a depot for the small locomotives that spent their lives ‘banking’. This involved the locomotives attaching themselves to the rear of trains and shoving them by brute force up to and over Whitrope Summit. There was also a depot where the various engineering materials and tools were kept to maintain the track and other equipment in the area. The company built thirty cottages to house the railway workers and their families. There was a co-op shop, a sub post office, a refreshment room, a one-teacher infant and junior school and a social club in the station yard. On alternate Sundays, a couple of local trains stopped to pick up any of the residents who wanted to worship in either Hawick or Newcastleton, but there were never many takers.

  To be honest few of the North British’s employees volunteered for duties at Riccarton Junction. The truth was that many of the workers there had been sent, often for disciplinary reasons, to a place regarded as a punishment, a kind of ‘sin bin’ where they could perhaps do the least damage. Given its isolation, this meant that the settlement resembled nothing so much as a lawless frontier town in the Wild West. Rumours circulated about an outbreak of incest at Riccarton Junction and of riotous communal orgies, and a company official was despatched to investigate. Perhaps to his disappointment he found no particular evidence of sexual irregularities but reported that the village was effectively being run by a gang of four women who made life an absolute hell for anyone to whom they took a dislike. It was serious enough that the procurator-fiscal and the police became involved, but although they sent the formidable viragos concerned on their way, Riccarton Junction continued to have a reputation for lawlessness.

  In such a necessarily self-contained community it was of course inevitable that from time to time the residents would get on each others’ nerves, but some relief was offered on a Saturday when a late afternoon train called which some of them used to travel southwards to Newcastleton. The goal was the Grapes Inn. There was no return train and so the sozzled revellers had little option but to walk the eight or more miles in the cess alongside the railway track. It was only to be expected that there were several near-misses over the years, and the company officially frowned on the practice.

  The line witnessed an extremely unpleasant outbreak of racial violence among the railway labourers employed in construction work in the Gorebridge area south of Dalkeith. The Irish workers on the site had a grievance about their pay and they retired in high dudgeon to a local pub to drown their sorrows. An itinerant peddler was trying to sell watches and handed two round for prospective buyers to look at. They were seized by the navvies who refused to hand them back, and then things turned nasty. Two Irishmen were arrested only for a large number of others to force the police to give them up. The navvies were triumphant but still angry when they came across a couple more police officers on their way to the scene. A fight broke out during which one of the officers received fatal injuries.

  This incident incensed the Scottish and English navvies working locally and a large force forced the Irish to retreat and then ransacked and destroyed their encampment, this being done, so it was alleged, while the police looked the other way. The word got around, the Irish calling up reinforcements, and an uneasy peace was only restored after troops were called out. The unfortunate police officer was buried in Borthwick Kirkyard, but it appears that his spirit refused to take things lying down and that he was frequently seen, in the form of a police officer wearing an early style of uniform, wandering restlessly in the vicinity of these tragic events. He has not been seen since the line closed.

  Fine Art Deco rel
ief sculpture decorating the LMSR side of Leeds City Station.

  The proposal to close the line was one of the most controversial in Dr Beeching’s package of changes with which he hoped would make the railways pay their way. The line closed on the first weekend of January 1969 amid warnings that lineside bombs were due to be detonated as the last train went past. At Hawick a party dressed as undertakers boarded the train carrying a coffin inscribed: ‘Waverley Line, born 1849, killed 1969. Aged 120 years.’ At Newcastleton the locals, led by the vicar, staged a sit-down strike which further delayed the already very late last train.

  With a detailed map, a compass, stout walking boots and the right clothes, parts of the line can still be followed today by those with a rugged constitution and determined disposition. Some of the splendid viaducts and earthworks can be viewed from the windows of their cars by those who prefer their creature comforts. The only trains that pass now are, of course, ghost trains.

  The Metropolitan Railway opened for business on 10 January 1863 with 30,000 passengers on the first day, and was viewed as an engineering marvel at the time. It was the first underground railway in the world and it ran from Bishop’s Road at Paddington to Farringdon. With over 270 stations and 253 miles of track carrying millions of people every year, the London Underground system is predictably crowded, claustrophobic and at times uncomfortable. However, it is also a defining part of London’s identity, recognisable by its distinctive logo, map and architecture, and it has served the transport needs of the capital for nearly 150 years.

  Not surprisingly it has inspired many stories, and anyone who has stood on a platform on an Underground station late at night will appreciate what an eerie place it can be with its labyrinth of subterranean tunnels and passages and just a hint that unseen entities may be lurking down there. As with the main line railway system, the Underground has experienced various closures and has its share of abandoned stations. As a train speeds along, passengers may catch a glimpse of one of the fabled ‘ghost stations’, the train’s bright lights reflecting off begrimed tiling on the platform. The building of and extension to parts of the system have entailed encroaching on old burial grounds and plague pits, and again ghost stories have arisen in connection with these. Ghosts do not take kindly to being disturbed.