Lol, well I'll still hold out on the Cornwall/Devon setting - the reason is due to something I found in a railway book about a proposed line to connect Falmouth with Exeter via Launceston - this would have had to have gone across the moors and tunnels would then be necessary. In the end this proposed line was never built, but imagine if it was!
Regarding Andrews and the practicality of the scheme; using the tunnel as a holding-ground allowed stolen/illegal goods to be secreted away for months until the fuss dies down and they can be safely redistributed. Using the train kept the local populace scared and ensured no-one would ever come prying into their business.
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(takes deep breath - here comes the big one)
Regarding Olly's yard - a yard in the middle of nowhere makes no sense - unless the yard was an operational necessity.
Consider this scenario;
The line is built by a small company under the auspices of the hypothetical Falmouth-Exeter line (given Tucky's account I'd say sometime between 1870 and 1890) to connect a mineral resource (let's say China Clay, a suggestion from the 'Famous 5 and the Haunted Railway' game) with a trunk main-line. The major engineering work is the two tunnels near the line's top end to connect Roker and Kilty Vales, where the Clay Pits lie.
During construction of the tunnels, the workers break into natural caves. These are opened out and used as part of the tunnel to Roker Vale, shored up where necessary.
The line opens and profits somewhat. However operational difficulties soon arise. To minimize construction costs the tunnel is built to as small a profile as possible (I'd like to correct Enid when she insinuates that tunnels of a mile length are short - boring between 1.5 and 2 miles of underground line is a massive feat and a big expenditure!). However reducing the cross-sections creates a problem - ventilation. Steam engines in a long, confined tunnel can asphyxiate their crews (this happened in Coombe Down Tunnel near Bath once and was a major issue in America) and since mineral trains are very heavy and require either very powerful engines or multiple engines working in tandem, running long trains through the tunnel becomes a hazard.
The solution? Build a yard (Olly's Yard) just below the tunnel. Trains coming up the valley can then be split up into smaller, more workable trains to then be forwarded through the tunnel by small engines that won't asphyxiate their crews. Similarly, loaded mineral trains coming down through the tunnel would then be shunted into larger trains at Olly's Yard and then assigned to a larger goods engine to be worked out of the yard and down the valley to the rest of the railway network.
The reason why this occurs to me is because of Enid's description of the yard having many 'pairs' of lines, which suggests to me a marshaling yard for making up and splitting trains, rather than a yard for the loading, unloading and transfer of goods.
So, things go well for several years, but then the unthinkable happens - the natural caves are part of a larger geological fault which was never discovered, and a shift in this fault causes a large section of Roker Tunnel to collapse (this again is similar to a tunnel on the Ffestiniog railway in Wales which bisects a geological fault - speed limits are imposed and regular checks made to ensure the fault doesn't shift). The company is forced to give up on the line to Roker Vale and brick the tunnel up at its portal and about two-hundred yards from where the line from Olly's Yard forks.
With half its profits sliced the line begins to fail, but a final reprieve comes with WW1 - the demand for material resources to drive the war effort generates a final surge of traffic, but then with the war done the company folds and collapses circa 1918 (the shepherd said the line had been closed for 30 years).
In WW2 however mysterious events lead to the construction of the 'dummy tunnel wall' and the secret chamber (like Julian suggested) by the Army/Ministry of Defence. Possible uses are for secret experiments, or as a sanctuary for something valuable (works of art were historically protected during the Blitz by being relocated to Welsh mines) or as a ammunition dump. It is at this point that a small locomotive and some rolling stock are brought in to work the line, and at the end of the war the railway is once again abandoned, and the train sealed up in the hidden tunnel as if nothing ever happened.
However, someone in the secret enterprise later becomes involved in the flourishing post-war black-market, and strikes on the idea of exploiting the legend, and thus we come to the story of 'Camp'.
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Regarding the legend of the spook-train, its possible that the story existed long before WW2 - I'd imagine digging such long tunnels would have led to deaths among the navvies, and possibly a crew did get suffocated by their engine, and some people could have been killed in the collapse of Roker Tunnel's roof. The sheer death toll on the line could have led to local legends and a general feeling of the line being 'a bad place', and then the coming of the train in the war and thereafter catalyzed the myths and gave them substance.
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Hope you enjoyed this little spiel - thanks for reading this far
(my apologies to any Julian-lovers reading this).
. Thanks.
Thanks for sharing!
