Pop culture has shifted the once-dominant harvest theme for October and Halloween into a celebration of spirits, ghosts and goblins. Many excursion and tourist railroads have gotten into the swing as well, not only to celebrate the season but to fill seats on their coaches and extend the normal operating season. Beyond current cultural trends, did ghosts actually cast their shadow over daily railroad operations?
Experts on ghost lore conclude that the ghost train is a phantom vehicle in the form of a locomotive or train. The ghost train differs from other traditional forms of haunting in that rather than being a static location where ghosts are claimed to be present, the apparition is the entire train – in motion. Ghost trains are reported in many different parts of the world where trains have at some point been prevalent forms of transportation.
Accounts of ghost trains have been reported in Canada, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom. In the United States, many states have claimed some form of a phantom, ghost train but the states most often recognized include Louisiana, North Carolina and Texas. But a parotitic phantom train, that graced states on the east coast, was once reported. A phantom funeral train is said to run regularly from Washington, D.C. to Illinois, around the time of the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s ‘s death, stopping watches and clocks in surrounding areas as it passes.
Louis C. Jones, once a folklorist and associate professor of English at College for Teachers, recounted in 1945 a New York tale of the ghost of Lincoln’s Funeral Train, which he discovered had been recorded at least a generation earlier by Lloyd Lewis, Chicago newspaperman and author of Myths after Lincoln, recounted in an Albany newspaper. According to the 1945 version of the tale, the ghost train could be seen one day every April travelling up the Harlem Division, with all clocks stopping whilst the train (actually two trains, the first with a ghostly band playing soundless instruments and the second with a flatcar carrying a coffin) passes by. He noted that in the earlier version of the tale, the train travelled on the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad up the Hudson Division, which would have been the correct route.
The last home of MTS in Maryland was in the community of Cockeysville (some know it by its gentrified name of Hunt Valley), less than one quarter mile from the store was the once-active mainline that was used for the first portion of the lengthy route of the Lincoln Funeral Train. In 1865 the line was known as the Northern Central Railway and even before his last journey home, President Lincoln rode the route several times and had passenger equity, so to speak. Mercifully, the phantom Lincoln Funeral Ghost Train was never spotted by our employees or customers – but it most certainly would have been an attention-getter that would have added to the theme of the store!
In daily railroad practice, haunting spirits were said to be forever part of a locomotive that had been in a major wreck where the crew was killed and the locomotive was later rebuilt and reentered service once again. Many crew members considered such a locomotive to be jinxed. That fear was once so widespread, a few benevolent railroads would accommodate the fears of cautious crew members and work the extra board until a willing crew, without superstitions, could be found to pilot the locomotive. The once-mighty Pennsylvania was not among the benevolent. Class K2sa Pacific #1387 was involved in two deadly accidents in 1922 and 1934 along the former Northern Central Branch, but management considered #1387 to merely another working unit – that had to earn its keep – so when the jinxed engine was rebuilt and reentered service each time, crewmen were expected to climb aboard and “get moving” without excuses.
In the spirit of the season, we created our own vision of a ghost train, at the top of this article. With apologies to CSX, we used a photo of WB I104 at Jackson, MD in November of 2024 as the base for our visual spoof. But the current MTS promotion for Halloween is not a spoof, and you can find a wide assortment of everything you need to enhance your model railroad empire. No trick or treat when you deal with the MTS family this season, and throughout the year.
Frank Wrabel
Modeltrainstuff.com