Michael Williams
IBEGAN to feel spooked when the booking clerk was reluctant to sell me a ticket. “A day return to Goole, please?” I ask at Leeds station, the second busiest on the network outside London. A ghostly chill pervades the air. “A day return? Are you sure, son? I can sell you a ticket to get there but don’t make any plans to come back in a hurry.” I can feel hairs bristling on the back of my neck as he says. “There’s only one train a day down the line – and it doesn’t always come back.”
There are other chilling omens. How come there are so few passengers on this ancient train? Why does the guard look suspiciously like Christopher Lee? But the truth is even more sinister, since the 17.16 to Goole is one of Britain’s elusive “ghost trains”.
These are services that wend an eerie path around the rail network to deserted stations miles from anywhere, almost entirely unknown to the public and running mostly without any passengers – since they operate at deliberately inconvenient times, often giving travellers no hope of getting back to where they came from.
There are reckoned to be as many as 50 of these “secret services” woven into the timetables – some running as infrequently as once a week. The direct line from Leeds to Goole is as mysterious as any, with a single train only in one direction in the morning with a solitary service the other way in the afternoon, returning to Leeds – if it is in the mood.
Yet my train and others like it around the country serve a hellishly cunning purpose. For the cost of an occasional train service with some elderly carriages, the train operators are able to duck the long and costly consultation, accompanied by inevitable howls of public protest, that the law stipulates when a service is to be closed.
THIS is why the ghost trains are known as “parliamentary” or “parly” trains – because they supply the bare minimum of service required by the law without having to bother with an expensive closure process. The fewer the number of passengers and the more inconvenient the timetable, the better.
But a journey aboard a ghost train offers special pleasures. The daily ghost train from London Paddington to West Ruislip offers a rare chance to ride on the old Great Western direct line to Birmingham – and the rail buffs pile aboard.
In fact, some of the “parly” trains are often so packed with train spotters that they defeat their purpose – none more so than the “Stalybridge Flyer”. This two-coach diesel service is one of the rarest trains in Britain, leaving Stockport at 9.22am on Fridays only, for its short journey around south Manchester.
At Gainsborough Central station in Lincolnshire, no passenger trains stop at all on weekdays (though there are six on a Saturday). Poor Newhaven Marine station in the Sussex port is officially open but has no services at all, except for a nightly ghost train that tantalisingly stops but allows no passengers to board.
More bizarre still is Barlaston in Staffordshire, where the last trains ran in 2004. The platforms are closed to the public, yet the service remains in the national timetable and you
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