There’s an affinity between trains and Christmas, but what precisely is the connection? Ghostliness comes into it – the mystique of a train in the wintry night. I think of the misty, hypnotic adaptation of Dickens’s story The Signalman, in 1976, part of the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas strand; or the ghost story in the Christmas number of the Railway magazine (that publication’s only excursion into whimsicality is always worth reading).
Prof Paul Salveson, founder of the Community Rail movement, has written some excellent railway ghost stories, but he thinks the more profound connection is that “trains bring us home to our loved ones, and they have a sense of warmth and comfort that cars don’t have”. He recalls, from the 1960s, “lots of “Christmas extras” taking hundreds of people home, to and from Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool, often through snow-swept Pennine landscapes. Salveson finds an echo of that Christmas warmth in some stations today: for example, Paddington, with its Friday night brass band. Continue reading...
