Railing through reality: Trains and mobility in Victorian ghost stories

Abstract

This paper explores the multifaceted cultural history of ghost trains in Victorian fiction by situating three little-known ghost stories in the publishing and social history of the second half of the nineteenth century. The figure of the ghost train offers a route into the entangled history of publishing and railways by contextualising the anxieties presented in railway ghost stories with the real-world experiences of passengers. Taking ideas of mobility as a focal point, this paper brings together discussions of virtual travel and the supernatural to demonstrate some of the impact railways had on reading and writing about train travel. More so than tales of other haunted transport technologies, it is the ghost train's unnatural capacity for movement that disturbs both passengers and readers. By both enhancing and warping reality, railways are ripe source material for Victorian ghost stories to entertain and demand questions of spatio-temporal experience from their reading passengers.

Railing through reality: trains and mobility in Victorian ghost stories

Ghost trains are a multifaceted cultural phenomenon. From theme park rides to screen and stage plays, the ghostly locomotive is an instantly recognisable interpretation of railways in popular culture from Victorian Britain to the present day. Ghost trains embody many different forms: they can be a spectre of a real train, often one which was involved in an awful and deadly crash, and continues to transport its now deceased passengers on their final journey; an empty train, that travels between this world and the next, sometimes taking unsuspecting living passengers into worlds unknown; or a physical train for ghosts, where living passengers are haunted by the spectres and memories of long dead passengers. In nineteenth-century interpretations of ghost trains, what remains constant, however, is steam locomotion and inorganic mobility identified as threatening. More so than tales of other haunted transport technologies – ghost ships or stagecoaches, for example – it is the (ghost) train's unnatural capacity for movement that disturbs both passengers and readers.

The emergence of the ghost train in Victorian popular culture is surrounded by a matrix of developments that provided the ideal appetite for this new literary phenomenon. First, railway accidents had become increasingly publicised since the fatal mutilation of William Huskisson on the inaugural journey of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, 15 September 1830. Frequent reports of injuries and deaths caused by crashes and explosions peppered newspapers from the 1830s onward: major disasters included the Clayton Tunnel crash, in which 23 people were killed and 176 more were injured, the Staplehurst disaster, where the “central and rear carriages [of the train] fell off the bridge, plunging onto the river-bed below”, killing 10 and injuring 40, and the Tay Bridge disaster, which saw the collapse of the central spans of the rail bridge, plummeting the entirety of the crossing train into the Tay River, leaving no survivors. ¹ Reports of these incidents, and many smaller besides, often brought about panics over the safety of travelling by rail. ²

The frequent and sensational reports of railway accidents then provided excellent source material for the Victorian reinterpretation of the Gothic, and its various related genres such as melodrama and sensation fiction, in the second half of the nineteenth century. A key difference between the nineteenth-century Gothic and its eighteenth-century precursor was its contemporaneity; whereas older versions of the genre were temporally and spatially removed from readers, usually set in medieval Europe, the new Gothic purposefully imported its narratives into modern-day Britain, bringing their threats into domestic, everyday spaces and taking inspiration from contemporaneous newspaper reports. This was particularly true of sensation fiction, which had no shortage of source material as the Victorian press had a “seemingly endless appetite for disaster news”. ³

Sensation fiction, the new Gothic, and their legacies in associated genres that persisted well beyond the boom of the 1860s, flourished with and in part because of, “the rapid expansion of the Victorian literary marketplace”. ⁴ As Richard Altick claims, “[o]ne major innovation, at least, resulted in an unquestionable increase in reading: the coming of railway travel”. ⁵ The expanding railway network not only supported the standardisation of education across the country, but also drastically increased the amount of “enforced leisure” time that passengers experienced on their journeys, prompting them to seek relief from “the boredom of staring out the window”. ⁶ The demand for reading material was then reflected in the expansion of bookstalls, most notably those of W. H. Smith, which “won a virtual monopoly throughout the country”; at railway stations across the nation it was seemingly impossible “for people to avoid reading matter; everywhere they went it was displayed”. ⁷ A large part of what these stalls sold to the reading, travelling public was what became known as “railway novels”: cheap printed material which often included various sensational tales. ⁸ Further developments which then contributed to the expansion of the press, meaning both more source material for sensational narratives and more page space to fill with literary content, was improvements in printing technology and the repeal of the newspaper tax and other “taxes on knowledge”. ⁹ These made purchasing printed material far more affordable, and meant that publishing could be a fairly profitable venture. According to Altick, the “result was that the weekly paper, with its agreeable combination of serial fiction and local news, became more and more appealing to readers in provincial towns and the countryside”. ¹⁰ Thus, the short story, including the short ghost story, entered a new age of popularity as editors sought content to fill their expanding pages, and readers sought “temporary excitement to relieve the dullness of a journey”. ¹¹

The corpus of short stories, ghost stories, and railway stories published in the press in the second half of the nineteenth century is vast. Unlike the serialised works they complemented, short stories in newspapers and magazines “truly lived an ‘ephemeral existence,’ as the larger portion of these stories were rarely revised or reprinted”. ¹² This article takes three little-known short stories published in various newspapers and magazines and reads them as the product of the swathe of literary, technological and social developments outlined above. Railway ghost stories, often consumed in the space of the railway carriage, present a metatextual adoption of the railway in literature, importing the virtual space of railway travelling into a literary space that was then experienced within real-world railway space while the reader was travelling. The three stories are: W. G. Kelly, “A Smoking Ghost” (1885); Mary Louisa Molesworth, “The Man with the Cough” (1894); and L. G. Moberly, “A Strange Night” (1897). All written by British authors (though Kelly's was published in a US-based newspaper), and featuring male travellers, as the “standard” representative of a railway user, I will demonstrate that these stories explore how “the railway resists realism and manifests instead as ‘phantasmagoria,’ including radical visual disturbance, proto-cinematic narrative, and dreamlike disorientation”. ¹³ Their genre, mode, and interrogation of railway mobility all reflect upon contemporaneous anxieties about the changes to daily life railway transport was making, and the modernity that change heralded.

There are, of course, a plethora of railway ghost stories found across the global nineteenth century, thanks in no small part to the construction of railways around the world by European empires. Railway ghost stories reflect the contemporary conditions of the locales within which they are written, and as such, those found in colonial contexts will identify a variety of both different and similar anxieties to those found in metropolitan cultures. Imperial gothic settings threaten white “Anglos” by bringing them “face to face with the very racial others […] that are supposed to be kept distant”, and conversely, (post)colonial gothic returns to the trauma inflicted on colonised communities. ¹⁴ However, there is some overlap in “domestic” gothic anxieties and those reflected in imperial gothic, especially concerning the railway's impacts on travel; by encouraging a degeneration into “mere tourism”, and the threat that “opening up the dark spaces of the world” would then open up Britain for “reverse colonization”, railways circulated imperial ideas throughout colony and metropole. ¹⁵ This article purposefully focuses on stories set in a Western context in order to first consider how familiar metropolitan settings and “everyday” journeys were warped and disturbed in ghost stories as a consequence of domestic social, technological, and literary developments.

The three stories I have chosen do not necessarily contain the most original plots: plenty of other ghost stories found in UK- and US-based newspapers and magazines touch on similar storylines or modes of haunting, by more popular or well-known authors. ¹⁶ However, the three selected for this study each place particular emphasis on the various ways the space, time, and mobility of the railway contributes to its haunting. As such, I will read them through a convergence of frameworks that encompass the real-world mobility of trains, the changes to the literary marketplace that impacted, and were affected by, the social reactions to railway mobility, and the virtual spaces that new forms of reading and new modes of travelling produced.

In Victorian ghost stories, tales that are acutely concerned with questions of history, time, space, experience and vision, railways work as a complex mechanism through which reality is questioned, threats are mobilised, and the vulnerability of humans in the face of the supernatural and technological is heightened. In addition, because by “the early fifties, railway travel had lost most of its novelty and become, instead, a routine accompaniment to life” in Britain, railways became a pervasive threat. ¹⁷

Railways demanded a recalibration of the relationship between time and space. Through the mechanisation of locomotion, trains could move faster than anything had done before, and were seemingly inexhaustible, able to produce movement without the requirement of exertion or effort, “and travellers therefore had no frame of reference for perceiving the distance-time relationship”. ¹⁸ Rail transportation not only altered the amount of time and organic energy necessary to travel from one place to another, but the “uncannily smooth” journeys marked a removal from the topographies through which they travelled. ¹⁹ No longer on a horse or in a carriage that would jolt and bump along roads, level iron tracks made journeys so (relatively) smooth, passengers felt like they were flying. This change of physicality then also meant people started to read while on the move. In fact, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes, “[r]eading while travelling became almost obligatory”. ²⁰ The new speeds railway travel attained, and the new ways of moving through space experienced by railway travellers altered perceptions of the landscape, removed from it as they were. This warping suggested a “dissolution of reality” which marked a “total emancipation from the traversed landscape: the traveler's gaze could then move into an imaginary surrogate landscape, that of his book”. ²¹ Thus, not only did railways impact interactions with the “real world”, they also directly influenced the production of “virtual worlds” experienced inside the railway carriage. By redefining the “spatial context of travel”, railways moved the “attention of the traveller inward”, on the “new social world” inside the carriage, and on “the interiorized space of a newspaper or novel to be read”. ²²

With a particular focus on the presentation of movement and mobility in Victorian ghost stories, contextualised by reading practices railways impacted, this paper demonstrates how railways were used as a bridge between real and virtual or supernatural worlds. The railway, in the below stories, destabilise their witnesses’ and passengers’ sense of reality by denying them control over various aspects of the journey. This was a common anxiety, especially in the face of railway accidents, which were often unexpected and occurred at “a pace too rapid for human intervention”. ²³ Even safe railway travel required passengers to relinquish control, as they had to navigate new and complex systems in order to complete their journeys. Through the schedules and timetables designed by railway companies, as well as designated routes and stopping points along lines, deviation from which could prove fatal, railways “enforced compliance on the part of the user”. ²⁴ Thus, in these ghost stories, feelings of anxiety, helplessness, and impotence envelop representations of railway travel.

As this article shall demonstrate, the figure of the Ghost Train offers a route into the entangled history of publishing and railways. By imagining new experiences of railway travel based on the real-world disruptions railway mobility caused, railway ghost stories create not simply an “alternative but an enhanced reality”. ²⁵ Seemingly perfect companions, ghost stories and railways capitalise on their readers’ and passengers’ “fascination with the extremes of human experience”. ²⁶

Connections

The earliest ghost story considered in detail in this article is “A Smoking Ghost” (1885) by W. G. Kelly, a British expatriate living in the US. Published in The Argonaut, a US-based newspaper primarily concerned with US politics, but which also included a wide variety of literary and review pieces, “A Smoking Ghost” is a prime example of the anxiety that accompanied an increasingly mobile, anonymous traveling public in both the US and the UK. As scholars such as Gilbert and Law have noted, the term “sensation” “had been in common use to describe exciting, eventful stories in the US” prior to the establishment of the genre in the UK in the 1860s. ²⁷ In the tale, the narrator is travelling “from Cornwall to the bedside of a wealthy old uncle” in Ashbourne. ²⁸ The train is initially quiet, and the narrator is alone in his carriage when the story begins. Soon, however, as the train stops to take on coal, “a passenger was hurriedly ushered, or rather banged, into my compartment by the conductor”. ²⁹ The stranger, it is eventually revealed, was a passenger on that very train exactly two years prior, and was killed on that journey. As in other ghostly, traumatic returns – in essence, “what the notion of haunting captures” – returning to the site of death works as a spatio-temporal transition between the worlds of the living and the dead. ³⁰ The specific time and space that first created the ghost then presents an opportunity for return as the anniversary recalls the past and pulls it into the present. The deceased stranger returns to the site of his death to usurp a living body so that he may once again enjoy his favourite pastime: smoking. While the idea of travelling on trains accompanied by ghosts was not an especially original idea – Amelia B. Edwards’ short tale “The Four-fifteen Express” also features the trope of a passenger's privacy intruded upon by the ghost of another passenger who had recently died on that same journey – what this text does particularly well is emphasise the differing levels of mobility that both railways and ghosts share, and can affect over the living.

Once the stranger first settles opposite the narrator in the carriage, a distinct change of atmosphere occurs:

The stranger was a tall, thin, middle-aged man, with a face lean and withered like a shrivelled apple. […] Observing his clothes steaming with the damp air, I began to realise that it had suddenly become very cold.

“Quite a change in the weather,” I remarked. “Very cold tonight, is it not?”

“Don’t feel the cold myself. Perhaps you would like to change places with me; there is no draft here.” ³¹

From initially having “the comfort of a carriage all to [himself]”, the presence of this stranger has immediately produced a sense of unease and discomfort. ³² This corruption of the comfortable railway carriage then prompts the narrator to accept the stranger's offer of changing places. Unbeknownst to him, however, this movement is not just to the seat on the opposite side of the carriage, but is a transition between worlds.

Looking at my companion on the opposite seat, on whom the lamplight now shone full. I saw that his face was not so thin nor his features so withered as I had first supposed; […] How cold it was, to be sure. As I looked at him I noticed that his aspect changed momentarily – that he was growing younger […] As his cheeks grew round and ruddy, and his hair changed from grey to brown before my very eyes, […] I saw the man sitting before me was no longer a stranger […] he had become Me! ³³

Here we see the railway carriage becoming a space within which beings can cross into other worlds, and the supernatural impacts the mobility of the living. Instead of remaining stationary in the carriage, the narrator's movement to another seat once the train was already in motion produces unintended and uncontrolled mobility. The physical movement of the passengers across the railway carriage transfers them across the divide between living and dead, and into each other's bodies. As Clive Bloom has identified, “creatures and forces of the supernatural have the specific abilities to transcend both time and space, cross the divide between life and death […] and travel freely within both the spiritual and material”. ³⁴ Their powers, what makes these beings “super”-natural, is their incredible mobility. To be able to move through and between worlds is clearly a powerful thing, and I argue that it is telling that Bloom's words quoted here resemble initial descriptions of railway mobility: transcending time and space, moving in such a way as to appear supernatural. Thomas Carlyle described travelling by rail as “likest thing to a Faust's flight on the Devil's mantle […] sweeping through unknown space”. ³⁵ The railway was a part of “the transformation of human experience of time and space”, which, as discussed above, was also affected by the changing literary marketplace and reading habits, that had also developed from and with railways. ³⁶ The railway's supernatural mobility is entangled with the relative stasis of the passenger, which is what jars individuals’ perception and comprehension of both the railway and its effects on the spatio-temporal.

As has been widely discussed throughout mobilities scholarship, mobility is an inherently political thing. Having the ability to move, and to choose where, when, and how to move, is a privilege experienced unevenly; as Tim Cresswell notes, often “one person's speed is another person's slowness. Some move in such a way that others get fixed in place”. ³⁷ In this example, it is the ghost's mobility, aided by the railway as the site of ghostly return, that then inflicts a form of immobility on the narrator. After swapping places with the ghost, the narrator realises he “was paralysed with the cold”. ³⁸ He has become “powerless”, imprisoned within the railway carriage. ³⁹ He has been forced into inhabiting a body and a space outside of his own, while the ghost usurps the narrator's position in the human realm in order to smoke. Mirroring the way rail travel “rendered the body passive and inactive”, causing feelings of impotence and immobility as, once locked within the carriages and on the move, passengers no longer had control over where they went, when they went, or how fast they went, the narrator has become the fully realised passive passenger. ⁴⁰ Furthermore, while ultimately this is a comic tale with no life-or-death consequences for the narrator, it is this forced immobility as a result of the ghost's railway mobility that is sinister, suggesting that, instead of simple narratives “of mobility-as-liberty and mobility-as-progress”, this ghost story recognises the actuality that the “faster we get […] the more our freedoms are threatened”. ⁴¹

We can further map a significant conjunction between the movement of the train and the movement of the ghost in this text as the journey comes to an end. As the train approaches Ashbourne, the final stop on this service, the ghost prepares himself to move across boundaries once again:

The train was slackening speed. My companion leaned out of the window puffing fast and furious. “Plenty of time to change bodies,” he said; “it shall be done in an instant, as soon as the train stops.” And he [continued] blowing great clouds of smoke till we pulled up at the depot, […] the conductor cried, “Change here. All change here, please.” ⁴²

Conducted by the conductor, the ghost moves as and with the train, until finally his mobility is stopped, and the mobility of the narrator/passenger is permitted once more: “A sudden glow of warmth seemed to pass over me […] I looked up for my companion; he was gone; I was alone in the carriage”. ⁴³ The ghost is conflated with railway mobility, explicitly described through railway imagery, “puffing and smoking” like a steam locomotive, and it is only whilst the train is in motion that is he able to inhabit a material body. Once the train stops, the ghost is expelled from the human realm. Railway mobility, as a threat to human life as seen with a multitude of fatal accidents and crashes, demands relative stasis of its passengers while in motion: “with external doors frequently being locked upon departure”, the carriage “effectively enforced imprisonment” for its passengers. ⁴⁴ Only once the train is stationary can the life and mobility of the narrator be returned to him. With the end of the line ends the spatio-temporal remembering of the journey that killed the ghost two years prior, and so the haunting ceases.

This text uses the motif of ghosts on trains to explore the vulnerability of passengers in the face of railway mobility. Alison Byerly suggests that, “[a]s individuals […] train travellers frequently felt disempowered, threatened, and diminished by the experience” of their journey. ⁴⁵ The narrator's body has been used without his permission, as his mobility and freedom are taken from him within the railway carriage. This ghost story combines the seemingly mundane with the terrifyingly sinister. Loss of control of one's body, the inability to save oneself when faced with railway mobility, entrapped within railway carriages with potentially dangerous fellow-passengers, are themes that continues throughout railway ghost stories.

Junctions: dislocated reality and the unknown

The new mobility railways produced was interpreted as facilitating the movement between the ghostly and the human realms, threatening passengers with both potentially malicious phantom travellers, and the possibility of transporting unsuspecting individuals to unknown and undesired locations. In “The Man with the Cough” (1894), a short story by Mary Louisa Molesworth, an author well known for her collections of children's and short stories, the threat of strangers encountered in a railway carriage is exacerbated by the loss of control over one's journey railway passengers must necessarily forego. ⁴⁶ This tale first appeared in Longman's Magazine, a journal which frequently featured works of fiction by other such writers of the supernatural and sensational as Henry James, Robert Louis Stephenson, and Margaret Oliphant. The journey narrated in Molesworth's tale is made strange not just by the narrator experiencing a type of haunting by an unsettling, anonymous travelling companion, but also by unexpected changes to the route. What was meant to be an overnight express seems to make an hours-long stop in an unknown location. The railway's threatening mobility in this story has the power to transport unsuspecting humans into unknown spaces with no comprehension of how they arrived there: mirroring real-life reactions to railway travel, “railways created the […] disorienting feeling of suspension between two places […] railway travellers arrived at distant destinations without feeling the sensation of having gone there”. ⁴⁷ Molesworth's tale hinges on the railway passengers’ disrupted experience of space; movement between the known and unknown worlds reflects a removal from the known environment, dislocating individuals in the abstract “relational space” of the railway. ⁴⁸ In Byerly's interrogation of ideas of virtual travel in Victorian realism, she astutely notes that,

Victorians described [railway travel] in terms that emphasize its power to challenge the boundary not only between man and machine, but between corporeal and mental experience. Victorian railway narratives […] reflect the difficulty of describing or even apprehending the railway journey itself, which is often elided, superseded, or invested with the hallucinatory qualities of a dream. ⁴⁹

This was a result of both the acceleration of movement that railways enabled, meaning that passengers had to recalibrate their sense of distance covered by time in line with railway mobility, and the homogenisation of localities that railway connections effected.

The expanding railway network across Britain had the unintended consequence of seemingly homogenising locales that had once been distinct. Increased connections and the apparent reduction of distance between places facilitated an eradication of individuality. As Michael Freeman notes, with the coming of the railway and the accessibility it provided to previously disparate locations, “came homogenization. Regions, towns and villages came to be more and more like each other”. ⁵⁰ In addition to this, the sense of being removed from the landscape through which one was travelling similarly standardised the sense of movement. Nigel Thrift labels the railway “the destroyer of experiential space and time” resulting in “localities [that] were no longer spatially individual or autonomous”. ⁵¹ The markers that people could once use to orientate themselves within established topographies were beginning to be erased.

In “The Man with the Cough”, the lack of control the individual passenger has over his own journey is highlighted from the beginning to create a sense of unease. The traveller is haunted by the possibility that he took the wrong train, a real-world anxiety that readers would have been able to – and may still – empathise with. Reflecting on the strange journey, he confesses, “I started by the express train agreed upon. So, at least, I have always believed, but I have never been able to bring forward a witness to the fact of my train at the start being the right one”. ⁵² The narrator's train was due to travel non-stop overnight from an undisclosed German town to a major junction in France early the next morning, before arriving at Calais in time for the first ferry across the Channel. After falling asleep for a few hours, he awoke at the change in the train's momentum:

But how was this? The train was not in motion. We were standing in a station; a dingy, deserted-looking place with no cheerful noise or bustle; only one or two porters slowly moving about, with a sort of sleepy “night duty”, surly air. It could not be the Junction? […] What, then, were we doing here, and what was “here”? ⁵³

That it is the changing momentum that signals a disturbance is significant. Now it is not simply that trains can move in new, supernatural ways, but that this movement is uncontrollable by railway passengers. Here, it is the forced immobility and surrounding slowness that concerns the passenger, whose journey is particularly time sensitive. Not only could he not control the velocity of his movements while on the train, but coming to a stop in an unknown location emphasises the inability for passengers to influence where they are moved by the train as well. The dislocating experience of rail travel is enhanced in Molesworth's tale, presenting an extreme example of what is “a central paradox of railway travel: the way in which one's body was able to outrun one's mental perception of place”. ⁵⁴ Either by sleeping on the train or distracting oneself with reading material, passengers could be transported to distant places without fully comprehending or experiencing their long-distance travel.

The narrator is left stranded in an unknown and unexpected station, without any clear indication of when he will be allowed to leave. The place he has arrived at does not appear to be a small town with a railway station, but instead a site solely produced by and for the railway, and as such has a qualities of being unnatural, a virtual space that seems almost unreal. A further element of this threatening railway space is its quietness: railways were understood to be the epitome of modernity, frequently associated with crowded, busy stations, as pictured in William Powell Frith's “The Railway Station” (1862), and therefore an empty railway station is void of any familiarity. The narrator is clearly disturbed by the lack of “cheerful noise or bustle” that signals a functional, typical railway station. Overall, “there was something so gloomy and unsociable, so queer and almost weird about the whole aspect” of this unknown station, that it feels wrong. ⁵⁵ As with the physical etymology of sensation fiction, that which is supposed to produce excitement of feelings and even perhaps physical responses, “ghost stories [also] play with the nerves and produce the same kind of ‘bodily sensations’” that resemble real-life situations. ⁵⁶ Passengers could sympathise with the terror at finding themselves in unintended locations with no comprehension as to how they got there, forced into a “transitional space in which their usual understanding of their own physical location was rendered irrelevant”. ⁵⁷ The rush of adrenaline the narrator experiences is both representative and productive of the same adrenaline passengers and readers may experience.

Returning to the perception of the homogenisation of spaces, and the creation of these in-between places along railway lines, the narrator despairs that, “From that day to this, I have never been able to identify [where the train stopped], and I am quite sure I never shall”. ⁵⁸ In agreement with Thrift's understanding of the experiential impacts of railway travel and construction, Charlotte Mathieson determines that the new, “homogenous space” along rail lines “was experienced […] as an altogether new and disorienting form of mobility”. ⁵⁹ As “[i]nitial reactions to spatial change often consist of mourning the loss of established sureties”, so the spatial homogenisation that was seen as an effect of railway connection destabilised travellers’ confidence in the designated route of their railway journey. ⁶⁰ The place the narrator has found himself in, passively transported to a place apparently only accessible via the railway, seems “above or beyond the material realm”. ⁶¹ Whether it is a real place just shrouded in darkness, somewhere beyond the human world, or simply a dream, is never concluded. It remains a mystery, tantalising railway readers with the possibility of their own journey making unexpected route alterations. Only through the virtual travel enabled by railways, that which was relatively smooth and inorganic, rather than the physically arduous and embodied travel on horseback or in a coach, could the disjunction between real place and virtual space be traversed. The railway is the mode of travel that has the power to transport passengers without their full comprehension or awareness of where they are going.

The railway's mobility is further threatening as the narrator almost misses the train as it begins to pull away from the unexpected stop. Now, not only is the traveller caused suffering by a delayed train journey, but is threatened by the possibility of being left stranded in the undesired location. As he leaves the ghostly “restauration” after a few hours to catch what he hopes will be the train to the French junction, he experiences “nightmare-like” (im)mobility:

it seemed to have grown steep, though I could not remember having noticed any slope the other way on my arrival. […] I felt as if my luggage was growing momentarily heavier and heavier, as if I should never reach the station; and to this was joined the agonising terror of missing the train. ⁶²

Clearly, this fear is not limited to tales of the supernatural. Perhaps an anxiety that all passengers can relate to is the sense of dread that accompanies being late for one's train. Again relating to the lack of control individual passengers can exert over their railway journey, here Molesworth uses the everyday anxieties caused by railway travel to universalise the supernatural threat of her narrator's disrupted journey. As Roberts explains, “ghost stories tend to use […] settings that would be familiar to the average person. The presence of ‘a strong vein of realism’ would amplify the effect of the story, and in so doing remind readers that no place […] is safe from evil insurgents or sinister forces”. ⁶³ New experiences of travelling by rail lent themselves ideally to Victorian interpretations of the supernatural. Real-world encounters with railways, passengers, and timetables had such serious effects on individuals that “anxiety about missing trains” and the nervous “shocks” mechanical transportation inflicted upon travellers “became a recognizable medical complaint”. ⁶⁴

As with the iconic last-second escape from the railway tracks in melodrama, an early influence of sensation fiction and ghost stories, the narrator is able to jump into a compartment just as the train begins to pull away from the platform. Evidently time sensitivity is inherent in experiencing trains. However, the narrator is not comforted by the assurance that he is once again on the move. Even though he is no longer immobile, the movement of the train is still strange: “the extraordinary silence and lifelessness of all about” does not characterise a typical railway journey in the natural world, which, like “normal” railway stations discussed above, should be bustling, loud and familiar. ⁶⁵ Molesworth's tale draws together an unsettling loneliness and incomprehensible mobility in her ghost train: “Not one human being did I see […] I might have been alone in the train – it might have had a freight of the dead, and been itself propelled by some supernatural agency, so noiselessly, so gloomily did it proceed”. ⁶⁶ As mental distractions such as reading or sleeping became possible with railway travel, so too did an unawareness of one's direction of travel and the possibility of journeying somewhere unintentionally.

The haunted timetable

The final story considered here contains the most explicit manifestation of a ghost train. Published in the South Wales Echo, a daily newspaper founded in 1884, “A Strange Night” (1897) by L. G. Moberly tells the story of two travellers, lost in some woods, who spot a railway line and follow it in the hope that it would lead them to a community where they could take shelter. At a clearing in the woods, the travellers find a small village the railway runs through, and a signal-box in the centre. But it is abandoned. There are no signs of life, and the whole place has an eerie quietness about it. However, as it is getting dark, the pair decide to stay for the night. The two witness a few trains trundle down the line, a comforting reassurance that the line is still in use, and a viable connection to humanity. Then, soon after midnight,

A distant rumbling broke the silence. “More trains!” I exclaimed. “What a busy little line. Some goods traffic, I suppose.” And in another moment a heavy goods train came in sight, pounding slowly along the lines furthest from us. “But yet another,” said Tom. He had hardly spoken when we caught sight of an engine coming round the bend, coming, to our intense horror and dismay, close upon the last rumbling can of the goods train. […] “It's the same line!” ⁶⁷

The two witness helplessly a catastrophic collision from the side of the line, marking the faces of passengers in the express who are totally helpless and unaware of their impending doom. The express train ploughs into the goods with an almighty crash,

The sound of the collision was one that I shall never forget, and following upon it came the yet more awful sounds of shrieks, cries, groans – cries of deadly terror, shrieks of agony. I have never in my life heard anything more terrible, more blood-curdling. ⁶⁸

It is the commingling of human and mechanical sounds that exacerbates the horror of human suffering. The focus on witnessing the passengers in a state of blissful ignorance, warmly lit inside their carriages before a devastating crash, which is then accompanied “blood-curdling” sounds of human agony emphasises the “terrible human costs of industrialization, framing” the railway, what was meant to facilitate easy and effortless travel, “as a site of Gothic torture, excess and horror”. ⁶⁹ A recognised terror of the railway accident was its suddenness:

railway accidents have this peculiarity, that they come upon the sufferers instantaneously without warning, or with but a few seconds for preparation, and that the utter helplessness of a human being in the midst of the great masses in motion renders these accidents particularly terrible. ⁷⁰

Part of the helplessness of the individual stems from the fact that “the crash of the train came without warning”. ⁷¹ Passengers are unable to brace themselves for impact, and observers are unable to prepare for the catastrophe they are then forced to witness, leaving all involved at the mercy of mechanical devastation.

The two travellers rush to help any survivors, but as soon as they reach the line the massive wreck disappears, and “[e]verything was perfectly still as if those crashing sounds, those shrieks and groans had never fallen upon the silent night”. ⁷² Here we have two ways the story leans on the real-life experience of railways in the production of this violent spectre. First, the story relies heavily on the jarring speed of railway travel, that is both physically threatening and seemingly incomprehensible to the human observers. Though railways had first marked an unsettling acceleration of movement in the 1830s – easily surpassing speeds organic mobility could achieve – by the 1890s speeds were still increasing, creating a “radical reconfiguration” of “perceptual experience”. ⁷³ The disappearance of the railway wreck is reminiscent of watching a train approach at close proximity to the line, and as it passes, in a violent instant it is gone. The crash disappears in a similar manner, leaving the witnesses with “feelings of uncertainty, in particular regarding the reality of […] what is being experienced”. ⁷⁴ That the witnesses are both unable to prevent the crash and are denied any chance of helping survivors because the wreck disappears, highlights human helplessness in the face of railway accidents; uncontrollable technological disasters remove the “chance to control one's own fate”, instead passengers and witnesses must relinquish control of their journeys, their mobility, and even their lives. ⁷⁵ As David Punter explains with reference to the new industrial order, “the individual comes to see him- or herself at the mercy of forces which in fundamental ways elude understanding”, and in this case that force is the mobility of the railway. ⁷⁶ This produces a literary engagement with “paranoia, manipulation, and injustice”, frequent themes found amongst railway ghost stories and sensation fiction, often purchased at railway stations for entertainment during a journey. ⁷⁷

In order for humans to safely navigate railways and railway mobility, precise scheduling is vital. This was quickly understood as the rail network expanded over various solar time zones, services became more frequent, and journeys navigated multiple lines: “During the 1840s, the operational demands of the increasingly dense, increasingly rapid, long-distance network ensured that railway companies favoured a single national system of timing”. ⁷⁸ However, even with a national “railway time” and detailed timetables, mistakes were made and accidents occurred: as “[r]eliability and regularity become the norms of accelerated motion […] any interruption of them assumes the form of a cataclysmic return”. ⁷⁹ Not only does deviation from carefully planned railway schedules threaten the human, but in this story, the devitalised essence of the railway timetable itself is a threat. The two travellers learn that the crash they witness is a ghostly repetition of an original catastrophe that occurred two years prior. Once again, a return to the space and time of the initial traumatic accident is integral to the functioning of this ghost train, as in Kelly's tale. Each night since the original crash, “the ghastly tragedy had repeated itself. […] Night after night the horrified dwellers in the hamlet were awakened to see the hideous drama played out, until they could bear it no longer”. ⁸⁰ This disaster has then been set to recur, haunting the timetable it once deviated from. Timetables allegedly provided “a means of persuading people of the ordered nature of railway travel: controlled, dependable, knowable in advance”. ⁸¹ So when accidents such as this one occur, when the timetable has provided no protection from the devastation of train crashes, the timetable becomes a part of the threatening figure of the railway and instead represents the inherent destructiveness of inorganic mobility.

The railway crash exists within railway time, immortalised by the railway timetable. It is clearly marked as a separate event, different to the rest of what happened the night of the crash. The travellers are told the tragic story of the signalman who was broken-hearted and drank himself to sleep on his watch. Incapacitated, and therefore unable to prevent the collision from happening, the deadly crash wakes him and, wracked with guilt, he commits suicide. Yet, this death does not recur. The text clearly presents these deaths as different, one being a singular tragic moment, and the other being immortalised in a devitalised experience of time. The mechanical seems to be classed as more traumatic, as it produces a “repetitive and intrusive return” accompanied by “a sense of powerlessness at impending disaster”. ⁸² Railways had demanded the standardisation of time across Britain, with “railway time” usurping the importance of solar time, becoming national time by the 1880s. People now lived by and experienced time through railways: “[w]hat began as a means to improve linear travel, to render the traversing of space less time consuming, transformed the very concept of time itself”. ⁸³ Just as railway time was slightly off – to varying degrees – from natural time, except in the Greenwich longitude, “[t]he time of the ghost is always, and indubitably, out of joint. And the best ghost stories show us how to take that untimeliness seriously […] a chance to extend the limits of literature and thus open up new questions about reality, about how we perceive and imagine it”. ⁸⁴ In this haunting, it is as if the railway crash is enshrined forever in a dimension of railway time, destined to repeat in the strict world of railway scheduling, out of reach and control of the individual.

As with The Illustrated London News, as Paul Fyfe has demonstrated, Moberly's tale identifies “the special appeal of railway accidents” to dramatically engage the most fundamental, natural experience – death – with mechanical, unnatural, incomprehensible railway mobility. ⁸⁵ “A Strange Night” shows “how the trivial produces the consequential, how the error or accident generates fascinating change”, and can have continuous, reverberating effects on those who witness and experience the railway. ⁸⁶

Conclusion

As this small selection of railway ghost stories has demonstrated, authors found ample opportunities in the genre of the ghost story to address the real-world anxieties and experiences of railway passengers. That these same passengers may well have been reading these stories on their journeys, or, if not read within the carriage, at least read with previous train journeys as a point of reference, makes the tales eerily relatable. Reading about the anxieties that train travel prompted – malicious strangers, wrong, late or missed trains, crashes and collisions – and having these mediated through the supernatural demonstrates the lasting impression of the supernatural that trains effected. Even after more than six decades of rail travel, that the supernatural was a successful framework through which to read and interpret the railway is evidenced by these tales and many other railway ghost stories besides. More so than other forms of transportation, the trope of the ghost train was successful because, as contemporaries observed, “we are all railway travellers”. ⁸⁷ The railway's unnatural mobility was used by writers of ghost stories to create a recognisable bridge between real and virtual, supernatural worlds. Lived experiences of travellers navigating the new reading practice of timetables, conforming to rigid railway routes, and succumbing to passive travel infiltrate these ghost stories, and are then re-experienced as railway passengers read about them on their journeys.

While the railway ghost found in nineteenth-century short stories was written, in the most part, as an ephemeral thing, the ghost train's longevity as a cultural trope has instead replicated the longevity of the ghost of or haunting the train. Returning to entertain readers, viewers, and amusement park-goers, it seems the disruption the steam locomotive caused to individuals’ perception of space and time, and the comprehension of movement, has meant ghost trains remain as exciting and relatable as when first envisioned. The space of the railway is a conflux of a multitude of virtual spaces, where the stationary passenger is moved passively across vast distances, where that same passenger may read to escape into other virtual spaces, and where the virtual spaces read about may well be re-presenting the railway space within which the reader sits.