One thing that has been going through my overly-fertile mind recently is that I have never - ever - heard any 'ghost stories' about the Stainmore line, although you could hardly imagine a railway anywhere more suited to host to the occasional blood-chilling tale. Railways the world over are routinely supposed to be haunted and in Britain we even have a substantial book on the topic - 'Railway Ghosts and Phantoms' by W.B. Herbert - billed on the dust jacket as '100 track rattling yarns'. It contains details of the famous 'Ghost of North Road Station' from the nineteenth century and also a story from the Darlington area - 'The Man in the Black Beret' which describes and encounter at an unidentified spot in the 1960's which could have been on the closed Darlington to 'Barney' line.
There are two lengths of line that I always felt might make a good spot for haunting. one is the stretch just east of the summit as the line winds down into a hidden stretch of the upper Greta Valley at the County Boundary. This was always 'frontier country' right back into the days when it was the Marches between Northumbria and Strathclyde and there must have been endless dastardly deeds done around this spot. The other is Big Hill Cut, a place that sends shivers up my spine on silent dark foggy afternoons and where I wouldn't want to camp for the night.
But maybe we do have some ghost stories of our own. Has anyone ever heard of one?
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