The railway phantoms and where they come from - Dennis Hamley

In  last month’s blog I reached a point where I was just about to launch into  a consideration of the Railway Ghost Story. There are so many of them that they almost constitute a separate genre. I’ve written two myself, both of them included in Out of the Deep, my supernatural anthology. And I’ve also written a novel in the old Hippo Ghost series from Scholastic. It was published in 1995 and, when it went out of print, I was fond enough of it to get the rights back and bring it out again on Print on Demand with Back-to-Front. The Railway Phantoms. A reviewer said that the main, entirely malignant, ghost was ‘A Heathcliff of the rails.’ I liked that!

The Scholastic edition (1995). You can get it at Amazon for 1p.

It is set in Wuthering Heights country and the railway in the present day timescale is a disguised version of the preserved Keighley and Worth Valley Railway. Its 19^th century manifestation was a fictional joint line of the London and North Western and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railways. Not so far away is Blea Moor, on the Settle-Carlisle section of the old Midland Railway from Leeds, reputedly the most haunted of all stretches of railway, and I was always aware of it just up the road, accompanied by all the spirits of the navvies who died making it.

Someone - I forget who but it was a story I found years ago in an anthology and then lost  - wrote a ghost story set on those moors near that fearsome railway which had images which have stuck in my mind ever since.  I wish I could find it again. So if anyone can identify it from this description I'd be so grateful. It is set just after the end of the Second World War. Two women just out of the forces - I forget whether they were Waafs, Ats or Wrens, but that they have shared bad experiences is important - have gone to the moors on a walking holiday. They are caught in a dense fog and lose their bearings. But momentarily the fog clears and they find themselves by the railway watching a long freight train pass along the cutting below them, with trucks carrying what look oddly and alarmingly like coffins. The fog closes again and so they resolve to follow the railway. They come to a house by the the track and knock on the door.

Inside are a couple, whether husband and wife or brother and sister I forget. The women enter. Now ensues a story of trial, stress and captivity. The story's ending is not good for them. The new couple's actual reality is in question, though, as I remember, we are never quite sure if they are supernatural. I seem to remember that one is, the other is not. The atmosphere in the house is of sheer terror. And there is an unforgettable image running through the whole. Coal. Black, hard, intransigent - but never used as an object, more as a blind and malignant force.

My The Railway Phantoms was in no way a reworking of this lost story. But, it hovers somewhere in my mind as a series of quarter-remembered but still vivid images. And the male character really was, in stature and effect, a 'Heathcliff of the rails'.

The Railway Phantoms had exactly the sorts of review I had craved – ‘A powerful, atmospheric story, full of the sights, sounds and smells of steam railways’, said The School Librarian while the TES weighed in with ‘Dennis Hamley lovingly reconstructs the detailed life of his long-dead characters – the gritstone cottages and their red-mufflered inhabitants – with the clarity of imagination rather than the sentiment of the heritage industry.’

Back-to-Front PoD (2005). Both images suffused by darkness and the sulphurous flames of hell. Just as I like them!

These reviews pleased me so much, because they describe exactly what I was striving for. The railway ghost story lives as much through its atmosphere as its supernatural possibilities, although the two are inextricable because railways are almost naturally ghostly, whether by night or day, whether in fog - as the two ex-servicewomen found out - or sunshine. Whether or not ghostly, to my mind the Railway remains the most important agent in the dawn of our age. No matter how arthritic a nineteenth-century steam engine may seem now, nevertheless it was the first harbinger of our modern hubris, the quantum leap from the limits of movement posed by the human or animal body, the biggest single step out of physical constraints of space and time since prehistoric humanity tamed the horse. I submit, therefore, that it has had a decisive effect on human psychology which has benefited writers ever since. And the first and possibly, in the long run, most decisive effect was on Charles Dickens, who hated and feared the things but who nevertheless wrote The Signalman, which has pretty well defined the genre ever since.

The Railway Phantoms has many features familiar to habitual ghost story readers. I make no apology for that fact. It begins with a recurring dream of hypnotic reality and tragic events, retelling the past, implying the future. The girl who keeps dreaming it has to go on holiday with her father as part of the custody arrangements. He is a fanatical railway buff and a volunteer on a preserved railway. 'My father looks an absolute prat,' thinks Rachel as she sees him in his ticket-collector's uniform. But when she gets to the railway she finds she recognises parts of it. She hears trains at night when no trains run, she finds her dream matches accounts of a railway disaster over a century before, that her father is somehow connected with it down the generations, a mysterious connection which obsesses him and caused his separation from her mother. And Rachel penetrates this tragedy, finds herself personally involved in its nightmare and realises the long revenge which is still being played out.

The School Librarian reviewer said that most of this was managed by 'a shameless literary device'. Dead right. I make no apology for it. In fact, I'm proud of it, I tell you. Yes, proud.

The Signalman is the brilliant precursor of all the themes here - as it is for so many ghost stories, whether or not about railways. The structure is simple. The narrator, an 'everyman' figure, blunders unknowingly into the scene and becomes the interlocutor of a haunted, frightened man who gives his testimony of inexplicable supernatural warnings of a future disaster which cannot be prevented and which in the end kills him. Some time before this, Dickens had been a passenger in the Clayton Tunnel rail crash of 1861. The horror of this, in a world not yet used to such trauma, affected him deeply. And, in The Signalman, it shows.

The frightened signalman

The deep cutting where it is always cold, damp and dark, the red lamp and the tunnel mouth, the image of a man shielding his eyes, the cry of  'Clear the way,' are all potent images which prey on the signalman's mind. And here is a strange thing - Dickens, so early in the history of the modern ghost story, has lighted on a significant feature which is curiously underused. 

We are used to thinking of ghosts as emanations of the past.  In their foreword to the Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, Michael Cox and RW Gilbert define ghosts as 'the returning dead . . . traditionally at home in mists and shadows . . .' Ghosts of the future are much rarer. But this ghost is a perfect example of a doppelganger, a 'fetch', someone who is living and breathing somewhere else as the signalman tells his story. And when the interlocutor recognises him, we have a satisfying as well as a terrifying epiphany, because it seals a perfect construct of the supernatural..

The deep cutting, the signal box and the fatal tunnel mouth

I've sometimes used the notion of the 'fetch' from the future in my own stories, especially The Overbalancing Man, included in Out of the Deep, which I found very satisfying to write. And that too is, inevitably, a railway ghost. The ideas of premonition, of disaster and uncontrollable force and destiny have suffused railways since their first inception, which makes them perfect vehicles for speculation as well as excitement.

Earlier, I said railways were ' a quantum leap.' There's another aspect to this which I've often thought about but I don't know of anyone-else who has. The backers of  the Liverpool and Manchester Railway set up a competition to select the best engines - the Rainhill trials. One of the rules they laid down was that all engines should consume their own smoke.  None of the entries could, so the organisers decided that getting the engines to run was more important than stopping them polluting the atmosphere. Rather than disqualify the lot, they quietly forgot the rule.

Think of it. If they had insisted on it in 1831, the idea that machines burning fossil fuels should not pollute would, over nearly two hundred years, have become second nature - the first requirement for every designer since, no matter what fuel was used. Just reflect on what that would have saved us from.

So it's not all good. We sometimes have to revile railways as well as love them.

I've often though about reissuing The Railway Phantoms but I don' t have it on a computer (I never did!) and a printed copy would have to be scanned properly. Way beyond me. And, as I've already found, practitioners are hard to find. Or could it be professionally typed? Well, of course. But that costs a bomb!

Next time - railways I have loved.