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Lychgate Tunnel

I don’t recall exactly what comment triggered it off, but while we were waiting for the orders to arrive, someone mentioned Lychgate tunnel, which had been the subject of many a railway story.

Jack Harris, who was normally the most reliable source of railway history in the group, said it was all a myth and that the tunnel had been a rumour started during the war, to fool German intelligence into thinking that valuables were stored there.
Then why, asked Vic Thomas, did a tunnel appear on old OS maps?

This discussion was an old one and centred around a portion of disused track that branched off for no apparent reason into Lower Lychgate and then terminated in a small yard on the outskirts of the village, apparently going nowhere and considerably overgrown. Nobody was able to account for it being built, or what purpose it had served, and yet there was evidence to suggest that it had at one time been the main line, rather than the gently-curving electrified route that now ran through Lychgate proper.

When the subject had been exhausted, there was a pause in the flow of conversation as pints were raised to thirsty throats.  In the ensuing silence, a voice from the other side of the public bar said: “I can tell you all about Lychgate tunnel.”

We turned to look and there in the corner was a man about 80 years old. He had a walking stick propped up beside him, but his eyes were bright and clear.

“Come over and tell us then,” said Jack, and we parted ranks to allow the chap some space. He sat down, accepted Jack’s offer of a pint and started to talk.

“I started work here as a lad in 1945,” he said, his eyes flashing from one of us to the next. “I was on the railway all my life, signalman in the main, although I did travel the tracks as a guard from time to time. Yes, you’re right,” he nodded to Vic. “The main line didn’t follow the way the new one does. There’s a good reason for it, I can tell you.

“I was apprenticed to old Fred Towler, the signalman, who’d worked the railways man and boy all over this region for 50 years and he told me about the tunnel. Oh yes, there used to be one, only a mile or two south of here. You won’t find it now. They removed it.”

“Removed it?” we asked. “How can you remove a tunnel?”

“Well, remove it they did, and that’s why you can’t find it now.”

“Why not? we asked. “Was it dangerous?”

He laughed. “Dangerous! Aye dangerous… but not in the way you might think.

“When the railway was first proposed to be extended to here from the London line, they surveyed the area and decided that it was less trouble to build a tunnel through Lychgate Hill than it was to make two or three bridges over the river and another two or three level crossings. It ended up a fairish size – about 500 yards long – and they built a signalbox about a quarter of a mile further down.

“Old Fred was in that box a lot and he told me the story in bits and pieces over the years. He could lean out of the window, look a hundred yards or so down the line and see the gaping mouth of the tunnel; and he knew as soon as it was built that it was a bad place.

“It was on a curve and you couldn’t see either entrance from inside. He used to mutter about it in the pub, but nobody paid him any attention.

“Some of the village lads would sometimes run through the tunnel for a dare or devilment. It was dangerous of course, as you didn’t get much warning of a train coming, although if you were caught inside you could get yourself into one of the safety recesses in the brick wall.  But one day a lad was caught unexpectedly as a train came through and was killed. Afterwards they built a stout fence round the line where it joined the tunnel mouths and that pretty much stopped it.

“One hot afternoon after the war started, early summer 1940, Fred was on duty in the ´box and got the signal that a goods was headed his way. Nothing unusual in that. He set the signals and knew from long experience that 21⁄2 minutes later he would be able to look down the track and see the loco emerge from his end of the tunnel.

“He set the kettle to boil on the gas ring but by the time it was whistling, there was no sign of the train. This did happen from time to time if there was a problem with shunting in a quarry yard at the far side of the tunnel, so he rang through to the quarry and they told him the loco had left on time and appeared to be running normally.

“After another couple of minutes there was still no sign of it, so, thinking it’s broken down, Fred set the signal to danger and phoned the quarry to get them to send someone to walk down the line. Half an hour or so later, he saw a quarryman come out of the tunnel mouth and shouted, a bit sarcy: ‘Where’s the train then? Have you lost it?’  The quarryman, clearly shaken, replied: ‘There’s no sign of it, Fred.’  The signalman looked sideways at him and took it as a joke but a few moments later Bill Crowther, the quarry foreman, emerged from the tunnel, white and shaken.

“Fred and Bill set all the signals to danger and walked the line right back to the quarry. There was a place where the quarry loop passed close to a small lake and a landslip there might have caused the train to crash. But there was nothing. They took lanterns and checked every inch of that tunnel. Everything was in order.

“A locomotive, a driver, a fireman, 20 or so wagons filled with gravel, a guard’s van and a guard, vanished into thin air. It caused a real stir in the village I can tell you, but it never made the news because of what was going on in France, as the enemy advanced and our boys were being first of all driven back to Dunkirk and then evacuated back over the Channel as the German Army closed in.

“Bill Crowther never said anything about it, but later on, his wife let slip that his laundry showed how scared he’d been.

“It was all hushed up. The wives of the driver, fireman and guard all got pensions and the men were officially classified as killed in an accident. There was talk of a strike when the next train was due to go through, but the quarry director himself rode on the footplate of the first train, which arrived safely, and things soon got back to normal – although Fred still didn’t trust the tunnel. He wouldn’t walk through it and preferred a mile detour if he had to go down the track for any reason.

“Then, in 1942, it happened again.

“One blue-sky summer afternoon, an excursion train was running from London to Shallowford-on-Sea with a factory works outing to the seaside. It ran into the tunnel at 45mph from the London end and never came out again.

“This time, Fred had no option but to walk into the tunnel. The cold sweat was running off his face and the hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end as he and his mate touched every brick between the two ends of the tunnel. But they found no trace of the train or the 58 people on board.”

At this point, the pub landlord arrived at our table with a further round of drinks and while they were being served you could see Jack’s brain going into search mode.

“Summer 1942?” he asked. The old man nodded.

Jack thought for a short while, put down his knife and fork and said that the only serious incident around that time that he knew of was the Pletchworth disaster of
July 1942. “One of our bombers had been badly hit by flak over enemy territory and was trying to make it back to base. It had been a dark, cloudy moonless night and
the crew got lost; when they ran out of fuel they baled out, with the aircraft subsequently crashing onto a passenger train.”

The old man shook his head from side to side: “You don’t know the real story.

“Men from London came up here. They took some old carriages, crashed them, set a petrol tanker against them and set fire to it all – then let it burn so that there was nothing left.

“The official word was that it was all due to that aircraft crash, but it was faked. The coffins were filled with sandbags and sealed. People wondered why some of them were too heavy and some too light.”

More than one pint glass hit the table with a thud.

“They’d never get away with it,” one of us said in disbelief.

“Well, get away with it they did, especially in wartime, when you weren’t encouraged to ask questions if something strange was going on. That’s why the so-called victims were buried in a communal grave. Anyone who asked too closely was told that the fire had been so bad that nothing was recognisable.

“They then arranged for one of our aircraft to ‘accidentally’ drop a big bomb on the hillside, right over the tunnel. Military engineers were sent up, declared it was all unsafe as a result of the explosion, and manufactured a collapse of earth and bricks about half way along the tunnel. Then railway engineers bricked it up and moved the permanent way to where you see it today.

“Soon after that it was D-Day and the news was all about what was going on in France as our blokes advanced, so the whole episode was overshadowed by the invasion.

“A year or so after the war ended, the story came back to the top of somebody’s in-tray in Whitehall and they sent up mechanical diggers and filled in the tunnel until there was nothing left... nothing at all.”

There was a long silence in the pub, then someone asked: “What happened to Fred, the signalman?”

The old man paused for a while.

“He was due to retire, but when he heard that the tunnel was going to be filled in, he was determined to overcome his fear and find out what had happened to the trains before it was too late. So he took a lantern, a pick to sound the walls, and told his wife he’d be back for supper.

“They found his pick the next day… lying a few inches short of one of the safety recesses.”

By Rob Davis