Perhaps it was the sheer improbability of the old railway line that worked its charm on us. It went
where no self-respecting railway line had any business to be - driving tunnels through great chalky mountains
of Wold, toiling up the long grassy banks from Louth and careering down their flanks at a breakneck pace. Even our affectionate name for it - 'The Lincoln Line' - supported
its awkward and contrary nature, because it was no such thing, really. owing to a mixture of muddle and mismanagement
it never reached Lincoln at all but tailed away, almost apologetically, to Bardney. And even there the trains ended up facing south - the 'wrong'way.
Especially in its overgrown and rusty dotage there was a melancholy air about the line. It had been doomed, almost from the start. 'A sure and
convenient way to carry the iron ore from Donington,' they'd said. There was one small problem - there wasn't enough iron ore at Donington to
make extraction profitable. The line struggled uphill, literally and metaphorically, for most of its short life. It never even lived to be a hundred and left no legacy of glory
or grand memories, except to a handful of us children, to whom it became a source of potent magic.
Looking back after all these years it is hard to express how much a part of our way of life and leisure it became. It was an artery which carried
us for miles along its length into the heart of a beautiful country in which one wishes that all the children in the world could play. We fished, paddled, brambled, birds'-nested, catapulted, romanced, even, along the
lines's margins. And yet whatever scrapes we got into, whatever imagined dangers we faced, there it was - always within our sight, a safe and dependable lifeline back to our firesides and the reassurance of home. It had
its eerie parts, though - great sun-starved, briar-tangled cuttings where few birds sang, and the tunnel - Oh yes, the tunnel. Here was the Alpha and Omega of mystery and shadow.
Its entrance - a blue brick mouth gaping from the hillside - had long been closed up with the makeshift dentistry of planks and sheets of tin, but there was a small door let in so that boys could screw up their courage and venture
through into the clammy darkness beyond
The tunnel lay at the end of a cutting which seemed to us to be of spectacular depth.To look down from the hillside to where the tracks had been was like peering into an abyss. Years later, I read an atmospheric
ghost story by Charles Dickens, called 'The Signalman'. The story told of a signalman whose box lay in such a cutting, near exaCtly such a tunnel mouth. He was
haunted by a nameless ghost who materialised as the result of a tragic accident in the cutting years before. It is hard to believe that Dickens did not draw inspiration from 'our' tunnel, but had we known the story then I do not think
we would have gone near the place. We would look up from the trackbed as if gazing up from the bottom of an abyss, but sooner or later we would pluck up courage to walk a little way into the darkness, breathing tightly, our feet crunching on the
cinders. We would listen out for any sound of menace or danger, but all we ever heard was the constant dripping water, leeching down through the casing of the tunnel from the chalk above. We had our own private fantasies about what might
lie unseen beyond us. Perhaps further on was a hidden siding where where a ghostly train sat, forever waiting for the days of steam to return. Perhaps there had been a murder, and the grisly evidence would loom out in front of us, death-white and shocking.
Perhaps......perhaps...
It was always a relief to emerge into the sunlight again, and even the sides of the cutting and the sky far above seemed reassuring
after the nameless horrors that the blackness had conjured from our imaginations. Above all, the word 'haunted' comes to mind whenever I think now about that line. I have travelled the world over, and there are few places which give me such an overpowering sense of loneliness.
The line, as it cut through those cloudswept hills must have once entwined itself with the human dramas which played out from those farms and scattered cottages.
Did the carriages bear away khaki-clad farm boys to have their rosy faces wasted on the battlefields of Flanders? To what joyful homecomings and to what sad departures did the trains bear clattering and wheezing witness? I have a compelling picture in my mind of a wistful face pressed against a
rainflecked carriage window as a waving handkerchief flutters into the distance.
Whatever tales the line could tell, it keeps its secrets now. It sits there still, untouchable on its embankments and deeply snug in its cuttings. To some it is a silent testament to a forgotten era, but to me it is an open book of memories.