The author does not believe in ghosts but he knows that human beings can be extremely unreliable witnesses of strange phenomena they claim to have seen or experienced. Some people are not above inventing stories about their ‘ghostly’ experiences in order to gain attention. He acknowledges that some places exude an inexplicable air of menace and events occur which do not seem to lend themselves to rational explanation. The idea that something lives on after bodily death both fascinates and scares us. Ghost stories have a long provenance.
Railways, especially in the steam age, have provided a fruitful source of supernatural reports and stories. Some are totally fictional, but others relate to actual events which simply defy explanation. Most of us can allow our imaginations to run a little wild when we visit disused tunnels, the overgrown formation of lines which lost their trains years ago, or closed stations. These are all places likely to stimulate our natural fears especially in the hours of darkness. However, reports of strange phenomena have often come from parts of the living railway such as level crossings, signal boxes and even well-occupied railway carriages and many seemingly relate to daylight hours.
The demise of mechanical signal boxes has been a long, slow process. Some survive into the third decade of the 21st century even still controlling semaphore signals. When mechanical signalling was the norm, a signalman needed to be a very special kind of person: steady, reliable, systematic and ever vigilant. Many signal boxes were to be found in the depths of the countryside and night shifts in these places were not for the faint-hearted nor those possessing too much imagination. The absolute darkness that might be experienced; the noises of the creatures of the night as they scuttled about their business; the bark of the fox and the screech of the owl were all capable of evoking primeval fears.
Often signal boxes were in cuttings where the sense of remoteness could be almost tangible. Even the presence of a country by-road some distance away with the sound of an occasional car in the witching hours only served to emphasise the loneliness of the signalman’s post. The lighting of the interior of the signal box was deliberately dim and was focussed on the block instruments and the train register in which the movements of all trains and any untoward incidents had to be recorded. The further corners of the box became at night
