Laura Wright 
There was a time when the sound of a train whistle was one of the most familiar sounds in America.
Railroads carried passengers between cities, hauled coal from Appalachian mines, transported goods across the country, and connected isolated communities with a larger world. Towns appeared beside railroad tracks, and others disappeared when the trains stopped coming.
With so much of American life tied to the railroad, it is hardly surprising that trains also found their way into our folklore.
Railroad history was filled with danger. Derailments, collisions, boiler explosions, bridge failures and accidents along the tracks sometimes killed dozens of people at once. Other passengers simply boarded trains and never returned home.
Perhaps that helps explain why, according to legend, some trains never quite reached the end of the line.
Throughout America, stories tell of whistles heard on abandoned tracks, mysterious lights approaching from the darkness and entire phantom trains appearing where no train should be.
Some legends even claim that witnesses have watched old railroad disasters happen all over again.
The Newark Train Station Hobo
An unusual railroad legend comes from Newark, New Jersey.
According to the story, a vagrant or hobo appeared at Newark Central Station one night and became increasingly agitated. He repeatedly warned passengers that “it” was coming for him.
Exactly what he meant was unclear.
The frightened man continued shouting his warning until the stationmaster finally lost patience and attempted to remove him from the station.
Then everyone heard it.
A train seemed to be approaching.
There was nothing particularly unusual about hearing a train at a railroad station, except witnesses supposedly couldn’t see this one.
The sound grew louder.
An invisible locomotive roared into the station.
The stationmaster reportedly heard the shriek of wheels against the rails and even felt the rush of displaced air as the unseen engine arrived.
Then something even stranger happened.
The terrified hobo disappeared.
The invisible train seemed to pull away from the station again, taking the mysterious man with it.
Whether the story began with an actual incident, became embellished through years of retelling, or belongs entirely to railroad folklore is difficult to determine.
But its imagery is wonderfully unsettling.
The man had warned everyone that something was coming for him.
According to the legend, something came.
The Phantom Train of North Carolina
One of the best-known Southern ghost train stories is connected with a terrible railroad disaster in North Carolina.
In 1891, a passenger train traveling toward Asheville derailed, resulting in a devastating loss of life. Twenty-two people were reportedly killed in the wreck.
The accident became part of local history.
According to legend, however, the wreck did not entirely remain in the nineteenth century.
Over the years, people near the site have reported strange sounds and apparitions associated with the railroad. Some accounts describe a phantom reenactment of the disaster itself.
Witnesses have supposedly heard the approaching train.
Then come the terrible sounds of catastrophe.
Metal screams.
Passengers cry for help.
In some versions of the story, witnesses believe the accident happening before them is completely real.
A few have reportedly become so convinced that people are trapped and injured that they have stopped passing motorists and desperately attempted to summon assistance.
But rescuers find nothing.
There is no overturned locomotive.
No shattered passenger cars.
No wounded travelers.
Only the old railroad and the place where a genuine tragedy occurred more than a century ago.
When History Repeats Itself
Stories such as the North Carolina phantom train belong to an especially intriguing variety of ghost tale.
The apparition doesn’t seem to interact with witnesses.
Instead, an event appears to repeat itself.
The same train approaches.
The same catastrophe occurs.
The same cries are heard.
Then everything disappears.
In modern paranormal terminology, experiences like these are sometimes described as residual hauntings. The idea is that an emotionally powerful or traumatic event somehow leaves an impression upon a location, allowing fragments of the past to replay under certain circumstances.
Whether anything of the sort is possible remains an open question.
Folklore, however, contains countless stories of places where history apparently refuses to remain entirely in the past.
Railroad disasters provide particularly dramatic examples.
The Ghost Train in the Darkness
Not every phantom train reenacts a disaster.
Sometimes witnesses report only the sound.
A train whistle is heard in an area where the railroad has been abandoned for decades.
Rails seem to vibrate.
A distant light appears along the old right-of-way.
The rumble grows louder.
And then nothing arrives.
Elsewhere, legends describe spectral lanterns moving along tracks, mysterious railroad workers, headless brakemen and the ghosts of passengers killed in accidents.
These stories became so common that the ghost train developed into a distinct part of American folklore.
The setting certainly helps.
Railroads can be eerie places after dark.
Tracks disappear into the distance. Telegraph poles and signals stand beside forgotten rights-of-way. Abandoned tunnels lead directly into blackness. Old trestles cross ravines where the landscape below cannot be seen.
And sound travels remarkably well along railroad corridors.
A whistle heard miles away can seem much closer.
Sometimes there is an ordinary explanation.
Sometimes nobody finds the train.
Why So Many Haunted Railroads?
The railroad transformed America, but that transformation came at a tremendous human cost.
Thousands of workers died constructing and maintaining railroads. Passengers were killed in accidents. Brakemen fell between cars. Engineers and firemen died in collisions. Pedestrians and travelers were struck at crossings.
Railroad workers understood danger intimately.
That naturally produced folklore.
Some stories served as warnings. Others preserved memories of genuine disasters long after the people involved had been forgotten.
Still others may have grown from strange experiences along lonely tracks.
Railroad folklore also traveled.
Workers moved from one railroad to another and carried stories with them. A mysterious light reported along one line might eventually acquire similarities to a ghost light hundreds of miles away.
Fact, memory and folklore became intertwined.
Eventually, nobody remembered where one ended and another began.
Ask the Old-Timers
One of the fascinating things about ghost train folklore is how local it can be.
A town may possess a railroad legend that has never appeared in a book. Sometimes the story survives only among families who lived near the tracks or among former railroad workers.
Ask about an abandoned trestle and someone remembers an accident.
Ask about an old tunnel and somebody knows why you shouldn’t walk through it after dark.
Ask why people used to avoid a particular crossing at midnight and you may receive three completely different answers.
That is how folklore survives.
Not everything mysterious was recorded in newspapers or preserved by historians. Sometimes a story lasted simply because one person told another:
“My grandfather heard that train, and there hadn’t been a train through there in twenty years.”
The Last Train
America’s old railroad network has changed enormously.
Passenger service vanished from countless communities. Branch lines were abandoned. Depots were demolished or converted into museums. Tracks disappeared beneath weeds, roads and hiking trails.
In some places, almost nothing remains to show that trains ever passed through.
Almost nothing.
Because according to the old stories, removing the railroad does not necessarily stop the trains.
Sometimes, late at night, a whistle still sounds in the distance.
A light appears where the tracks used to run.
And somewhere beyond the darkness, a locomotive that should have reached its final destination generations ago is still coming down the line.
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