A couple of days ago I asked here one '150 Diary' if anyone had come across any 'ghost stories' relating to the Stainmore line. And now maybe we have our first haunting. Mike Thompson has passed on to me a file of material written by Vernon Pearson that he received earlier this year.
There is some interesting stuff in there and I won't fully disclose the full story here of this 'happening' because we will probably be publishing it soon in a new 'Stainmore Miscellany'. But here is the bare bones of what Vernon wrote.
He was coming off early turn at Stainmore one very foggy winter Friday and went down from the box and into the lamp room to prepare some signal lamps. While he was working there he heard the shrill whistle of a 'J25' which surprised him because when he had signed off a couple of minutes before no trains were 'on line'. He went outside to check but there was no train approaching he thought that he must have just imagined it.
Later he went back up into the cabin and jokingly told the three people there that he'd been 'hearing things'. But they told him that they too thought that they had heard an engine out in the dense fog, somewhere just near the 'up' home signal.
That use to be pretty well where the westbound carriageway of the A66 now comes to where the old road to Barras once branched off to the left.
Spooky eh? "The 'J25' out in the Fog." Any more stories of the inexplicable out there?