WAITING FOR THE GHOST TRAIN

One of the major sources of employment for inhabitants of Milton Keynes is that rather larger, rather older and much dirtier city at the southern end of the Euston Line - London. Every working day hundreds if not thousands of Milton Keynsians travel, from Bletchley, Central Milton Keynes and Wolverton, fifty miles south to Euston, from where the Tube carries them all over the Metropolis. And every night, over a rather wider period of time, it carries them home again.

This is the story of a commuter called Charles.

Charles was like many other young office workers. He commuted into London from Central Milton Keynes. Most evenings he was out of Euston fairly sharply on the 17: 20. But sometimes he went out on the town in the evenings, and went home much later. This particular evening had been the night of the office Christmas drinks session, and as a result he was on his way home some time after midnight.

The nature of Euston Station gradually changes over the course of the evening. From four o'clock until half past six, the travellers are mostly commuters, and the trains mostly those anonymous, four- or eight-car units where the seats are never quite large enough for the average man. The three-person seats are just about large enough for three ten-stone commuters, so when three fifteen-stoners sit in a row, something has to give. It is normally the one on the end, who ends up wobbling precariously with only half his bottom on the seat. When two large people sit either side of a small one, the one in the middle can pop out of their seat like at cork from a bottle.

After 6:30 the early evening Inter-Cities start ploughing out of London, weighed down with Brummies returning from day trips, and people on their way to Scotland or Wales or Ireland. For commuters going home after a quick drink, or after a bit of overtime, there is at this time the luxury of an Inter-City seat, a quick journey, a bar - the chance, for smokers, to smoke. In short, the early evening Inter-Cities are to the commuter trains as Milton Keynes shopping centre is to the Wolverton Agora.

After 9.30 life becomes much quieter. This is the dead time of the evening, with half-hourly trains stopping everywhere you've ever heard of, followed by one last flurry of Inter-Cities.

After eleven o'clock, it all changes again. All the shops are shut now. Where the newspaper seller was selling the Evening Standard, it's now tomorrow's Daily Telegraph - always a sure way of confusing a drunken commuter. If anyone is unlucky enough to be walking around sober, they will notice that most of the commuters are varying two or three yards either side of a straight line as they make their way across the station. Sometimes they bang into the walls.

At this time of night, there is only one type of train available. They are much fuller on Fridays than on Mondays, for obvious reasons, and they are full of a mixture of theatre-goers, slightly drunk commuters, and very drunk commuters. On the night in question, Charles was after one of these trains. It had been a very long-running Christmas do. The first pint had been poured in the Cheshire Cheese at five thirty, followed by drinks in the Newton Arms and the Cittie of York. They had drunk their way from the City through Holborn and ended up in a West End bar which Charles had finally left at half past twelve, after seven hours' drinking. A cab down to Euston, and now Charles was legging it down to Platform 8 with three minutes to spare - trains are an hour apart at this time of night, so he did not want to miss it. He threw himself through the doors and fell asleep in the corner of the carriage.

I've already mentioned that the early-evening trains stop everywhere you've ever heard of. The late night trains are like this with one exception - they also stop everywhere you've never heard of. Chief among the places you may never have heard of is Cheddington.

According to Milton Keynes commuter rumour, Cheddington is a small village between Tring and Leighton Buzzard. The reason its existence is only a rumour is that no-one has ever seen it. Cheddington station is so remote that not only is it near nowhere else, it's not even near Cheddington. Cheddington station is a deserted platform in the middle of nowhere, where nobody ever catches the train. If you're on a train in the middle of the night, and the doors open and shut but nobody gets on, you're in Cheddington.

Charles was fast asleep as the train pulled into Cheddington. Nobody got on, and nobody got off. The doors made gave those four high-pitched beeps which tell you the train is about to go, so get a move on if this is your stop. The first beep woke Charles. By the second beep he had looked out of the window and realised it was nowhere he recognised. The third beep saw his hand on the button which opened the doors. As the fourth beep sounded he was out of the train and on the platform. The doors shut and the train pulled away. Charles wondered where he was.

The reason he had jumped off so quickly was that, the last time he had fallen asleep after too much to drink, he had woken up in Fort William. Admittedly that had been on an Inter-City train, but even on the current train he had been running the risk of ending up in Birmingham. Now he took stock, to realise just how far he had gone past Milton Keynes. He looked at the sign across the tracks. With the alcohol and having just woken up he could not read it first time. He shut his eyes, opened them, unfocused them, refocused them. Cheddington. Oh great. Fifteen miles short.

He sat to wait for the next train. He knew that it would be an hour until it arrived, but then he would have had to catch it if he had missed the one he had just jumped off. Cheddington Station is an eerie place at night. There is the sound of the wind blowing across the fields either side, the humming of the overhead power cables. The ticking of the clock as it counts off each minute - in this case, the clock said "E1:8A", which is a fairly normal time for a digital clock on the railways. The only reason the railways have digital clocks is to make it harder for people to know that their trains are late. To make matters worse, at this festive time of year, a light fall of snow had settled on Cheddington, making the fields look like a winter wonderland, and driving Charles into the bus shelter- like waiting room. The odd flurry of snowflakes scuttled across the platform, adding to the festive cheer and Charles' gloom.

Charles fell into a light doze in the waiting room. When he woke the time was now EC:2H. A train was approaching, and he gratefully jumped on board. He remained standing this time, determined not to go to sleep again. The train pottered along for a mile or two, and then stopped. And stood there for ten minutes. A voice came over the intercom.

"We apologise to customers for the delay to this Northampton Line service. This is due to operating difficulties in the Leighton Buzzard area, a landslip at Rugby and wallabies on the line at Ledburn Junction. We hope to continue with this service as soon as possible. "

Charles smiled at the use of the old-fashioned term, Northampton Line. It was Silverlink now, and before that it was North London Railways, an interesting description for a service that went all the way to Birmingham. Charles wondered if the people of Rugby, Coventry and Birmingham had noticed that they had been annexed as suburbs of North London for several years. There was a pause for ten minutes. Then another announcement.

"We apologise for the continuing delay to this service. This is due to an unexpected sheep at Bletchley."

People tutted, and made comments about typical - always some stupid excuse. There was a ten-minute wait, and then another announcement.

"We apologise for the continued delay to this service. This is due to damage to overhead power lines caused by migrating geese."

You had to hand it to them, thought Charles, they were really coming up with some good ones tonight. Somebody had left an Evening Standard on their seat when getting off the train earlier in the evening. Charles picked it up to have a flick through it. Reading the Standard is recognised by all commuters as a good way to use up five minutes of a journey. The paper was full of articles about Mrs Thatcher. Odd, thought Charles. Perhaps she had been on another of her lecture tours. There was an interesting article about the problems with the housing market - apparently the prices were rising faster than ever, but various economic experts said there was no forseeable end to the boom. It was this article that made Charles think something was really wrong. He checked the date. 10th June, 1988. Fear gripped Charles, as he realised why the train on which he was sitting was of the old type. He had thought it had just been caused by one of the rolling stock shortages that were so popular. There was another announcement.

"We apologise once again for the delay to this service. This is due to a hanglider pilot landing on a train at Roade, a lorry trapped under a bridge at Long Buckby and a snow drift at Penrith."

There had always been tales among the commuters, awful stories of a train which had set off from Euston one evening but never arrived at Milton Keynes. You heard these daft rumours - it was said one train had been delayed with a pregnant woman on it. By the time it finally got moving again, the woman had given birth and her child was fined 50 for travelling without a ticket. But the train which never reached Milton Keynes, it was said, travelled the railway for ever, never quite making it into the station. Charles realised he was sitting on the railway equivalent of Hell - a standard-gauge prison where the tormented souls of a trainload of lost commuters were condemned to listen to lame and bizarre excuses for all eternity.

"We apologise for the continuing delay to the service. This is due to a lost python at Hemel Hempstead." Charles jumped to his feet, desperate.

"You don't have to stay on this train! You can get off! Open the doors! Jump out! Walk home! Don't just sit there - you'll be stuck forever!" Some of the ghosts looked at each other with the sort of embarrassment that accompanies any unsolicited communication on a commuter train. Some of them pulled their Standards up further in front of their faces. Not one of them moved.

"This is your last chance! You've been sitting here for years! British Rail doesn't exist anymore - these trains don't run anymore. You're all ghosts. Look at you - you're all ghosts." He sat down, the effects of too much Sam Smith's making him dizzy. Hope suddenly dawned in the black eyes of the phantom commuters.

"He's right - we don't have to stay here. We can walk home." They started filing down the aisle of the train. They opened the doors and jumped down. Charles noticed that where the drop to the gravel took the breath out of him, even the oldest of the ghosts seemed simply to float down. From inside the carriage they could hear the guard pleading.

"Please do not detrain. Customers should not de-train except when the train is platformed at a station stop. Customers detraining in a non-platformed manner run the risk of being hit by another service. We regret that, due to an electrical fault at Stafford, no services are currently running between Euston and Manchester Piccadilly."

The ghosts and Charles set off in a Northward direction. The ghosts ran straight up the line between the rails. Charles, aware that he was made of flesh and blood rather than ectoplasm, stuck to the side of the track. He realised this was a wise move just as they approached Leighton Buzzard. A train heading for London ploughed straight through the crowd of phantoms. The phantoms simply ignored it, but Charles could see the terrified look on the face of the driver. Charles kept running as he heard the sound of screeching brakes behind him.

Through a sleeping Leighton Buzzard they ran. Some of the ghosts clearly lived there, as they peeled off from the main group and ran up the stairs and out of the station. As each one passed through the ticket barrier they seemed to melt and finally to vanish, as they were at last released from their imprisonment.

Two hours later, now flagging from their exertions, Charles and the ghosts reached Bletchley. Charles was surprised that ghosts became tired, but reflected that they'd all been sitting down for ten years, so were probably a bit out of training. Again a group of ghosts peeled off. Charles wondered if their cars were still in the car park, but then thought to himself that, Bletchley being Bletchley, most of their cars would have been stolen by the evening the train had originally been due in.

Now dawn was approaching, and the pace of the remaining ghosts quickened. They broke into a ragged run again, the older phantoms dragging behind. As the first hints of pink started to appear over the bowling alley, they staggered into Milton Keynes Central. Charles was relieved to find that it was evidently not a Northampton ghost train that had been delayed, as the ghosts would never have made it before the sun rose. They ran up the stairs, across the bridge and through the empty ticket barrier. Charles followed the ghosts as they fled out onto the concourse outside the station. Clearly it was an evening train that had been delayed, as half of the phantoms hailed taxis while the other half picked up an Indian takeaway. Charles himself wandered out through the ticket barrier. There were no taxis, and no people. He smiled a relieved smile and started out on the three-mile walk home.

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