All aboard Britain’s spookiest train lines

can still buy a ticket there. But the trains will race through without stopping.

Surreal, too is Polesworth in Warwickshire, where there is only a northbound platform, serving a single train – the 07.23 to Crewe. If you want to get home again, forget it. You can’t travel south since the platform footbridge was demolished years ago.

Weeds grow high on the platforms along the Leeds to Goole line. At sad-looking Knottingley, once a stop on the main line from York to London, the fine double-span overall roof has been demolished.

From here on, as the train rumbles on into remoter countryside, I am the sole passenger. And I start to question whether I am still in the land of the living when we stop at little Hensall station, a time capsule with an enamel sign advertising Wills Capstan cigarettes, where an ancient railwayman opens the equally ancient crossing gates by hand.

As our ghost train sighs to a halt at Goole, mausoleum-like with its peeling paint and empty platforms, the words of Flanders and Swann from their 1963 song Slow Train couldn’t be truer: “No one departs, no one arrives, from Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives.”

I muse on the luxury of having an entire train to myself – just the driver, the guard and me. But here’s another thought. Is it just a quirky eccentricity of British life that a secret train should run empty down this line each night when my fellow commuters have travelled home in conditions worse than cattle?

Or is it simply a barmy way to run a railway?