Ghoul Brittania by Andrew Martin

Author:Andrew Martin [Andrew Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907595974
Publisher: Short Books
Published: 2011-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

GHOST TRAINS

A good railway journey ought to lull the passenger into a dream state: the hypnotic motion, the flickering images beyond the window, the closed, unknowable faces of the other passengers. When my train from the North East approaches King’s Cross, and glides through the soft gloom of those tunnels in which bells, like abandoned telephones, ring in relay for some mysterious operational purpose, I sometimes feel as though I am being roused from a long reverie.

The ghostliness of our railways has of course declined since the end of steam. British literary atmosphere in the classic era came from real fires, and steam locomotives were essentially real fires on the move, carrying with them their own mystery and metaphor in the form of the cloud of steam. The grimy diesel-hauled carriages of my own boyhood still had some possibilities. There were dimmer switches above the seats, for instance, so that passengers might set the atmosphere to their liking. But the modern network is over-rationalised. You can’t get off a train without being warned that the ‘platform surfaces’ might be slippery; and all trains must be painted yellow at the front, so you can see them coming from a long way off. This is very unghostly, since the stealthiness of trains was part of their deadly glamour. In nineteenth century fiction trains were very often the instruments of death. In Dombey and Son (1846) by Charles Dickens, the villain, Carker, is run over by a train: a ‘red-eyed monstrous express’. It ‘licked up his stream of life with its fiery heat.’ In The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope (1876) the villain, Lopez, is ‘knocked to bloody atoms’ by a shrieking Scottish express going at ‘a thousand miles an hour’.

The worst decade for railway accidents was the 1860’s, when train numbers and speeds were outstripping safety provision. The worst of the decade occurred at Abergele in Wales, where runaway paraffin wagons – vehicles obviously emanating directly from some signalman’s nightmare – collided with the Irish mail train from Euston. Thirty-three people were instantly immolated. Charles Dickens himself had always been wary of trains, and it is as though he brewed up a smash out of his own tremendous imagination. In 1865, he was riding on an express from Folkestone to London that was derailed on a bridge at Staplehurst in Kent. Ten passengers were killed; Dickens’s health and nerves were permanently undermined, and on subsequent train journeys he always clutched the armrests of the seat, feeling the carriage was ‘down’ on the right hand side. Shortly after the accident he wrote one of the earliest, and best, railway ghost stories, ‘The Signalman’.

This sallow, neurotic functionary is practically in his tomb when the story begins, inhabiting as he does a signal box sunk in a dank cutting, where he is fixated on the adjacent tunnel mouth, and a glimmering red signal light. The narrator observes, ‘So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.

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