Off the Rails

∨ Off the Rails ∧

15

Tube Tales

“North End.”

“City Road.”

“Down Street.”

“British Museum.”

“Lords.”

“Trafalgar Square.”

“Strand.”

“That became the Aldwych.”

It was, Arthur Bryant conceded, an unusual way to end a Monday.

Seated in the gloomy, cluttered staff room of King’s Cross underground station at midnight, sharing bottles of warm beer and listening to the guards who had just come off duty, he wondered about the kind of person who would be attracted by such a lightless, closed-off world. He looked around at Rasheed, Sandwich, Marianne, Bitter and Stone. The others were naming underground stations that had been closed down over the years.

Rasheed was so impossibly thin that his uniform seemed virtually uninhabited, but he had just eaten an enormous curried beef pie in under five minutes. “I never heard of no station at Trafalgar Square,” he told the assembly, unwrapping a Kit Kat for dessert.

“It was on the Bakerloo Line,” said Sandwich, who was as broad as Rasheed was slender. When he tipped back on his plastic bendy chair, Bryant half expected the legs to buckle. Sandwich’s real name was Lando – he had been named after a character in a Star Wars film, and hated it – and now he was called Sandwich, because no-one had ever seen him eat. “They got rid of it ‘cause it wasn’t used enough, and anyway, it’s only a two-minute train ride from Leicester Square to Charing Cross.”

“Covent Garden to Leicester Square is only two hundred fifty metres,” added Rasheed. Stone nodded in agreement, but rarely spoke. Small, opaque and nondescript, he looked like an exhausted lifer who had spent too many years underground, away from sun and fresh air. Bitter – so called because that was all she drank – was heavier and healthier, but didn’t seem to like joining in with the others. Everyone agreed that she had communication issues. Apparently she liked working alone at nights, coordinating tunnel maintenance.

“Most of the central London stations are only couple of minutes apart,” said Sandwich. “A strange line, though, the Bakerloo. Brown and gloomy, and all them twisting tunnels, loads of them derelict and closed off. The Bakerloo stations all seem underlit to me, even Piccadilly Circus. Sort of yellowy at night, but friendly.”

“I was posted at Camden Town for a while,” piped up Marianne, a West Indian ticket clerk, the only one who was dressed for the world above. “They used to change the listing on the central destination board from Bank to Charing Cross branch, just to make the commuters run backwards and forwards between the platforms.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Rasheed, finishing the Kit Kat.

“No word of a lie,” Marianne told him. “And we used to get them commuter pigeons.”

“I beg your pardon?” asked Bryant, intrigued.

“Yeah, they live outside the West End and come in for the food. We used to see ‘em all the time on the Northern Line, but we couldn’t work out how they knew which station to get off.”

“You’re having a laugh, man,” said Sandwich. “All right, then, here’s a good one. Which is the only tube station with a Z in its name?”

“Belsize Park,” said Marianne. “Easy. Which station is the only one that doesn’t have any letters in the word mackerel?”

“St John’s Wood,” said Stone.

“I suppose there are a lot of games you can play with the tube map,” said Bryant.

“Oh yeah, loads. Like the one where you have to make a journey that passes through one station on each of the thirteen lines. I can tell you something weird about the District Line,” said Stone, who looked like he hadn’t visited the city’s surface since the death of Winston Churchill. “I know why the trains run quieter when they pass under the Inns of Court and the Houses of Parliament.”

“What do you mean?” asked Bryant.

“When the District Line was being built, the MPs and the lawyers all complained. Said the noise of the trains would ruin their concentration. So the railway company chopped up the bark of hundreds of trees and laid it below the tracks to cushion the carriages, just for them. Money talks, see.”

“Tell him about Bumper Harris,” said Sandwich.

“Oh, everyone knows that one,” Stone replied dismissively.

“I don’t,” said Bryant, who did, of course, but wanted to hear their version.

“When they opened the first escalator at Earl’s Court in 1910, everyone was too scared to use it. So they hired a bloke called Bumper Harris who had a wooden leg, just to go up and down on it all day. Passengers figured that if a one-legged man could use it safely, they could, too.”

“Why was he called Bumper?”

“Apparently he lost his leg when two railway carriages bumped together.”

“When they dug out the tunnel at Earl’s Court they found a seam of prehistoric oak, and six walking sticks were made out of it, with silver handles,” Stone added.

“Yeah, pull the other one, it’s got bells on,” said Rasheed.

“It’s true. My granddad had one of ‘em. His missus was a Confetti Girl at Chiswick Works. She counted the bits cut out of tickets to tally the change, then sold them for weddings.”

Bryant had come down here to question the staff about unusual events occurring on the tube system, but had been sidetracked. He had not fully realised what he was letting himself in for; everyone here, it seemed, had tales of drunks and madmen, gropers, flashers, con artists, thieves, buskers, fights and suicides. Yet, for the most part, it seemed that the system ran with amazing efficiency. Nearly eighty million passengers passed through King’s Cross every year. Sometimes, over three million journeys were made through the tube system in a single day. Bryant was astonished by how few deaths there were.

“My cousin Benny, right, he was in charge of the track-mounted flange greasers at Rayners Lane,” said Sandwich, whose whole family worked down the tubes, “and one morning he got the grease dosage wrong, and every train on the Victoria Line ended up skidding straight past its stations. There was a devil of a ruckus about that.”

“So what happens if you spot something suspicious happening in the foot tunnels or on the platform?” asked Bryant.

“I can get the LT police there in seconds, but if there’s a problem, like it’s peak hour on a Saturday night or Arsenal’s playing at home and the LTP are busy dealing with something else, I can issue a station code and we send our nearest team down there. Other passengers used to help out more, but they’re scared to now, what with knife crime.”

“But I’ve heard about weird stuff at this station,” said Rasheed, hunching forward on his chair. “Always late at night. You follow someone on one camera, you know instinctively they’ll appear on the next one – only according to some of the guards they don’t. They just vanish into thin air. There’s this one bloke, I’ve heard about him a few times from a guard at Canonbury station, one moment he’s heading down the escalator, then he’s running in the tunnel and the guard’s thinking why’s he running? He can’t hear a train coming ‘cause there’s not another due for three or four minutes, then he watches the platform monitor, expecting him to appear – only he never does. The way this bloke tells it, he’s the ghost of a dead passenger, some bloke with a broken heart who threw himself under a Piccadilly Line train a few years back.”

“I heard about him, too,” said Marianne. “After the last Victoria Line train had gone. Creeping along one of the empty tunnels close to the floor. In a shiny black raincoat, like a giant bat. Gave my friend Shirley the willies. She saw him again a few days later, standing on the concourse at Highbury & Islington in the same outfit, surrounded by people, but nobody else saw him. Shirley thought she was going mad. A giant bat, just crawling through the empty tunnels…” She let the thought hang in the air.

“They reckon that passengers saw ghosts after the Moorgate disaster in 1975 – ”

“A real mystery, that was,” Sandwich interrupted. “Forty-three dead, train overshot the platform and ploughed into the dead-end tunnel. There was nothing wrong with the train, the track or the signalling equipment. The driver was a good bloke, careful, conscientious, he just didn’t apply the brakes. Hadn’t even raised his hands to cover his face before the impact. He was still sitting bolt upright at his post before the collision, still holding the dead man’s handle. If you release it the brakes automatically connect.”

“Had to have been suicide, then,” said Stone, opening a beer. “Bitter, do you want a bitter?” Bitter accepted a can.

“The driver had three hundred quid in his pocket when he died, was going to put a deposit on his daughter’s car right after his shift. That’s not the action of a suicide. I suppose some good came out of it, with TETS.”

“What’s that?”

“Trains Entering Terminal Stations, also known as the Moorgate Control. Special stop units put in place to release the air from the train’s braking system.”

“And what about the blood thrower?” added Rasheed. “About once every couple of months, someone on the last Piccadilly Line southbound gets sprayed with blood. They’re not hurt or nothing – it’s just this nutter who goes around chucking blood over people. We don’t know where he gets it, and we can’t catch him. Course, the tunnel power goes off after the last train, for the incoming workers from Tube Lines, the company in charge of the infrastructure, so maybe he escapes to the next station.”

“Can we stop now?” asked Marianne. “All this talk’s starting to give me the willies, too.”

“Yeah, I’ll give you the willies.” Sandwich laughed, cracking up the others. Even Bitter managed a lipless smile. “Hey, you know Upminster Bridge station in Havering?”

“Yeah, end of the District Line,” said Rasheed.

“There’s a swastika on the ticket office floor – can’t tell if it’s a Nazi-type swastika or like Hindus have, you know, the reversed swastika for good luck. I used to be a home-beat officer on a council estate in West London, and when Indian families got a flat, the first thing they did was create one out of dried beans on the floor.”

Bryant studied his new friends with interest. Perhaps the London Underground system was a place where men and women could come to forget the outside world, like the Foreign Legion. Was it really only a job, or did some of them feel uncomfortable when they finally ventured out, blinking into the sharp blue light of day?

“Come on, just one more,” said Rasheed.

Everyone groaned in protest, but he continued. “I heard about a man who got off the train when it opened its doors by mistake at South Kentish Town tube station. This was in 1951, and the station had been shut for years, but the train doors closed before he could get back on, right? His name was either Brackett or Green, there’s different versions of what happened next. He used his lighter to find his way along the platform, and burned bits of old posters to provide light. The lifts were turned off so he tried to get out by climbing all two hundred ninety-four steps up the spiral staircase, but when he got to the top he banged his head on the boarded-over floor of the shop above, and had to go back down. He tried to flag down trains for days afterwards, but none of the drivers would stop, and eventually he became too weak to move. He was found by a bunch of gangers coming up the tunnel, but they were too late to save him.”

“There are so many things wrong with that bloody story I don’t know where to start.” Marianne had a throaty, dirty laugh. “Why would he get out at an unlit station? And if he died, how does anyone know he banged his head? What do you think, Mr Bryant?”

Arthur was miles away. He was trying to understand why Mr Fox might have moved his operations underground. The tube system was vast, and connected every part of London. But more importantly, the axis about which it turned was now King’s Cross. The Eurostar linked it to the rest of Europe. Almost overnight, Mr Fox’s lair had become the gateway to forty-eight countries.

But what he was doing here, and what he might be planning to do, remained a disturbing mystery.