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Since we're coming up on Halloween, I thought I'd post this here.
First off, I am a skeptic's skeptic. I don't believe in ghosts AT ALL. That being said, I'd think it was neat if there were ghosts. Still, I have heard two stories that were very odd.


A guy I served with in the Army swore to me that he saw a ghost train along the Rhine river in Germany when he was stationed there in the mid 90s. He said he was stopped at a level crossing and saw a train blast through with a large steam engine on point and dozens of box cars trailing. All of them had barbed wire in the windows and arms were clawing their way through. It made no noise at all, he even rolled down the car windows and heard nothing. Normally, I'd think that was BS, but this guy was a rock and not prone to making stuff up.


I heard a disturbing story on the radio three years ago (on NPR if I recall) about a siding that used to be a main line somewhere in the Midwest. Sometime in the 70s, dozens of folks living along the siding one night called the police saying a steam engine had just roared by and that it was going way too fast to be able to stop at the end of the track. The police went out expecting to respond to a wreck, but didn't find anything. It was at night and nobody saw it but lots of folks heard it. The police even checked with anyone who might have a running steam engine, they supposedly even called the Southern to see if one of their excursion engines was in the area but nothing was ever found. It never happened again. One thing that I thought it might have been was someone with some kind of vehicle on flanged wheels and a audio tape of a train. The fact that lots of folks called it in does seem really odd. I wish I'd caught more of the details but I didn't get where or exactly what year this was.

 

Lots of room for ghost stories in RR lore, any others I've never heard of out there?

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Freaky.  Thank you for starting this thread. Several years ago, a coworker at Steamtown in Scranton, PA commented on how loud the train was that roared through Gouldsboro, where he lived, at night.
Now, he knew our schedule, and the local railroad, Delaware-Lackawanna, ran rarely at that time. Much less at night. I had a heck of a time telling him there was no train. He did not mention if it was steam or diesel.

    Years ago I had a co-worker who could imitate the sounds of a wide variety of things (airplanes, birds, dogs, horses, trains, cars skidding, etc.) to perfection (at one point he put on a one hour show for the company).  He was a salesman and he spent a lot of time on the road in his territory.  For fun he installed a microphone, speakers and amplifier in his car and he would use this to broadcast some of his sound effects from time to time. 

 

   At one stage of his career he found himself having to make very early morning runs from city A to city B in order to meet the demands of two separate sets of clients.  The route he took was a mix of 4 lanes and wide 2 lane roads.  On one of the two lane stretches was a town with a main street which had a gradual rise and fall to what was obviously an abandoned grade crossing. At the crest of the rise he could see over to one side what had to have been the foundations of a long departed depot. 

 

   On his second or third trip, as he passed through the town in the early morning hours, he turned on his broadcast system and made the sound of a steam train blasting through, complete with chuffing and whistle. He had to make this run several times during a three to four month period and he repeated this early morning performance every time he passed through that town.

 

  After the last trip a month or two elapsed before he had to make the run again but this time it was a daylight run.  As he drove through the town he realized he was low on gas so he pulled into a gas station, filled up, and then, as he was paying the attendant, he asked the whereabouts of the local train station.  The attendant said there wasn’t one to which he replied, “That’s funny, I could have sworn I heard a train the last time I came through.”  The attendant gave him a furtive, nervous, sideways look and sort of whispered, “You heard that too?”....and thus another ghost story was born

Last edited by Robert S. Butler

There is a pretty famous one about a grade crossing accident involving a school bus. The story is that if a car stops on the tracks the "ghosts" of the children killed push it off the tracks. Several people have tried it out. Alas, analysis of the road indicates that the road crosses the tracks on a downward slope even though visually it looks otherwise, but the legend continues.

 

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