tiger_moran | I'm not saying that was a ghost train but maybe it was a ghost train

Currently thinking about what if I made D326 into sort of... an actual character? I don't mean in a Thomas the tank engine sort of way just... having it as a recurring 'character' almost and playing with the idea that a lot of these trains do really feel like living breathing things. The fact that it was scrapped in reality wouldn't even work against this idea in the context of my original fic because it would totally fit the whole destruction/resurrection thing and if I've got some 'vampire' character who loves trains they could have salvaged parts of it, enough to reconstruct it with the 'soul' of it intact maybe.

Do inanimate objects have souls? Or spirits? People claim to have seen ghost trains I mean trains that are ghosts not like the fairground rides. I saw someone claim they saw an entire ghost diesel train go past them for instance. They probably all have a logical explanation really but I love the idea of actual ghosts of trains. Unfortunately I so far haven't found anything about British trains returning as ghosts ('British ghost trains' means something else entirely), only about stations or railway carriages that supposedly have ghosts of people or animals. I like to think though that the trains I hear sometimes usually at night or once when we were in the woods we heard a train very close by are the ghosts of scrapped trains running along lines that got closed and ripped up decades ago (the line that ran by the woods is long gone. A section further down the line does exist but it's not a proper railway main line).

I love the story about the St Louis ghost train in Canada though it's all anecdotal 'evidence' and 'my great grandmother said such and such' but like with every story like this nobody seems to know the name of the guy who supposedly got killed by the train or anything, there's nothing of any substance, plus none of the lights in the videos I've watched really look to me anything like train lights going along the tracks or someone carrying a lantern along the line as they are meant to be. Most look like exactly what they probably are, car headlights shining over the old line due to diffraction (or quite possibly sometimes people looking for the lights going on the old line while carrying lights themselves). I mean I've seen that similar sort of effect myself with lights from far away that aren't visible usually sometimes appearing much closer - there's a power station with red lights on it several miles away and you cannot ordinarily see anything of it from this house but sometimes, when the weather or the atmospheric conditions are right, if you look from the front bedroom window you can see the red lights shining as if they're right at the end of this street. It is very weird. But because that's a static light source it's probably not going to be mistaken for a ghost train or whatever.

But I do love this idea of ghost trains running along 'ghost' railway lines.

Wait I've just thought of something let me check something

(Coincidentally while trying to look up something else I stumbled across some photos online of one of the old railway lines taken shortly before it was ruined to put in a tramline and I'm slightly devastated because it was even nicer than I remember it (this was where I used to walk my golden retriever sometimes. She of course is long dead) - the railway was long gone but it was this lovely green space in the midst of what became just a vast housing estate, with a footpath along it but mostly it was grass, bordered on either side by quite large trees. They ripped it all out, the trees, the grass, the railway embankment, the footpath. It's all gone, replaced by trams and as far as I can tell just a tarmac path alongside the line (I don't like the trams any more than I like modern trains. They at least seem entirely soulless to me))

So I was going to say I think if there was going to be a ghost train round here it probably would only be less than two and a half miles away because there was collision there in the 1970s which unfortunately killed both drivers and a guard and to make it more traumatic at least one of them was trapped in the wreckage alive for several hours before they managed to get him out (he died later that day sadly). And one of the trains was essentially destroyed by the collision and scrapped soon afterwards because the damage was so bad. I think the other two trains survived but were scrapped eventually. So I mean, if ghosts are something that can be created by tragedy and trauma that seems like the right sort of incident that could create a ghost. That's on the still active line though not one of the ripped up lines.

Anyway now I just realised what date that happened on. Which reminded me of something weird that happened last year when sometime during the night (I don't know what time but it was certainly after two a.m. and before dawn) I got woken up by what I'm sure was train horns honking repetitively and for quite a long time. It's not really unusual to hear train horns because the main lines are only like 2-3 miles away and especially during the winter you can hear them more clearly presumably mostly because then the trees aren't in leaf but that was really odd because it was loud and it was repetitive and it went on after I got woken up by it so I know full well I didn't dream it. I've checked what date that happened on because I did make a note of it. It was the same date as that train crash, which happened shortly before dawn that day. What does that mean?

(I can only think either the trains were honking then as some kind of acknowledgement of the anniversary of the date/time of the crash. Or I actually did hear a ghost train or ghost trains)