The True Story of a Cold Night and a Train.

It’s misty again tonight. It’s also noticeably colder than last night, there’s a chill breeze blowing, and the disgruntled cows down by the river are sounding their disgruntlement as vociferously as they were last night. The chill and the mist reminded me of a night just after Christmas, 1995.

I’d spent the holiday period visiting friends in London, and had caught the 5.45pm train back from Euston. It should have arrived at my home station at 8pm, but it didn’t because the engine broke down somewhere in a remote part of the English Midlands. We remained stationary on the track without heat or the means of preparing food or a hot drink for 4½ hours. We wrapped ourselves up against the increasing cold and waited patiently. The British tend to wait patiently in the face of unavoidable adversity.

Eventually a replacement engine arrived and we continued the journey, finally reaching our destination at half past midnight. A group of relieved passengers stepped out onto the platform, and rarely have I felt such a sense of desolation.

A station should be a bustling place, but not that one on that occasion. The last scheduled train had long since departed, you see, and so the place was all locked up. The platforms were deserted and eerily quiet, and beyond the platforms the night air was thick with a heavy, freezing mist. The ghosts of electric gantries loomed in dark grey half tones wrought by the weak light spilling out from the station, and little pools of water with ice-encrusted edges rippled in a sharp, bone-searching wind. Even the lamps on the platform were switched down to a minimum number, sufficient only to light our way to the empty foyer where a single attendant had been retained to receive us. He told us that the fleet of taxis we’d been promised hadn’t materialised, but he was doing his best to arrange some more. The first one arrived half an hour later and I was lucky that it was going in my direction, so I was one of the first to leave. I’ve often wondered how long the others had to wait.

This should have been one of those portmanteau horror films they made in the 1960s, the ones in which a group of strangers on a train tell their stories to a mysterious man with a tarot deck. They’ve all done something to be ashamed of, and when the train stops and they alight, they discover that they’re dead and on their way to hell.

But it wasn’t. Neither did the attendant tell us the story of a ghost train that rushes through the station at dead of night, concluding with the enigmatic question ‘If it be a nat’ral thing, where do it come from? Where do it go?’ OK, so now I’m being fanciful. The only conclusion I can offer is that I made it home all right, had a mug of hot soup, and went to bed.