Mike Ashley - The Platform Edge

[dem]

Mike Ashley [ed.] - The Platform Edge: Uncanny Tales of the Railways (British Library, 2019)

Enrique Bernardou

Mike Ashley - Introduction

Departures in the Light:

Victor L. Whitechurch - The Strange Story of Engine Number 651
Zoe Dana Underhill - The Conductor's Story
Anonymous - A Desperate Run
W. G. Kelly - A Smoking Ghost
L. G. Moberby - A Strange Night
Huan Mee - The Tragedy in the Train
Mary Louisa Molesworth - The Man with the Cough
Percival Landon - Railhead
Edgar Wallace - The Barford Snake
Dinah Castle - A Ghost on the Train

Approaches in the Dark:

Rosemary Timperley - The Underground People
T. G. Jackson - A Romance of the Piccadilly Tube
E. F. Benson - In The Tube
A. J. Deutsch - A Subway Named Möbius
Michael Vincent - The Last Train
R. Chetwynd-Hayes - The Underground

Return to the Light?

F. Scott Fitzgerald - A Short Trip Home
Ramsey Campbell - The Companion

Blurb:
The Platform Edge is a collection of the greatest stories of strange happenings on the tracks.
In this express service into the unknown, passengers join the jostling of the daily commute, a subway car disappears into another dimension without a trace, while a tragic derailment on a lonely hillside in the Alps torments the locals with its nightly repetition.

From the open railways of Europe and America to the pressing dark of the London Underground, The Platform Edge is the perfect travelling companion for unforgettable journeys into the supernatural.

One for Dr. Proof.

Rosemary Timperley - The Underground People: (London Mystery Magazine #25, June 1955). Commuters as mindless trad. zombies perpetually travelling the London underground network, destination nowhere. I agree with the editor that author "deserves to be much better remembered" for her ghost stories, but this one, which blames the faceless "Them" for everything as usual, is not one of her more dynamic.

Dinah Castle - A Ghost on the Train: (London Mystery Selection #79, Dec. 1968). "But suppose," he said, staring at me with his ice-blue eyes, "that two people saw the same ghost?" I wanted to tell him to shut up.... Narrator shares a compartment with a garrulous middle-aged chap returning from a funeral. They are joined by a frail, uncannily silent old woman in black ...

Michael Vincent - The Last Train: (London Mystery Selection #61, June 1964). Veteran tube driver Harry confides in colleague Bert that he has seen a crowd in pre-war costume manning the platform at 'Museum,' the central line 'ghost' station between and Tottenham Court Road. When Harry disappears a day shy of his retirement, Bert resolves to investigate the phenomenon for himself.

R. Chetwynd-Hayes - The Underground: (Amy Myers [ed.], After Midnight Stories, 1985). " ... Life was merely a short quick trip from cradle to grave and what happened on the way didn't amount to much. "Laura Munro, a middle-aged typist is haunted by the ghost of a despondent looking young man in army fatigues stood on the platform at Charing Cross Road. Mr. Munro is imposing upon her to marry dull, tight-fisted Harold Smithers, her 'steady' of two years, but Laura much prefers the phantom. Gradually she discovers the soldier's connection to her mother, who died under a train when Laura was a child.

E. F. Benson - in The Tube: (Hutchinson’s, Dec. 1922: Visible and Invisible, 1923). A premonition of suicide. Can the psychic Mr. Carling prevent Sir Henry Payle from throwing himself beneath a train?

[Shrink Proof]

Jun 2, 2019 11:16:58 GMT dem said:

Mike Ashley [ed.] - The Platform Edge: Uncanny Tales of the Railways (British Library, 2019)



One for Dr. Proof.

Yes, well, I'm about a third of the way through it at the moment and it certainly seems to be. Verdict so far - good rather than great, though I suspect that it's going to get creepier as it progresses. Much like a number of railway journeys I've taken over the years (travelling in almost-but-not-quite-alone carriages rumbling round the London Underground, desolate midwinter treks across the frozen wastes of the Scottish Highlands, night-time steam locomotive footplate rides in the fog, you get the idea...).

Will let you know once I've finished it...

[Shrink Proof]

Now finished, so, as promised, an update. Generally pretty good I reckon. Nearly all stuff I hadn't read before, which always helps. A surprisingly spooky tale by F Scott Fitzgerald of all people, an intriguing story "A Subway Named Möbius" which envisages the Underground as a topologist's nightmare, a (sadly) rather ho-hum tale by the often excellent Rosemary Timperley, Ramsay Campbell's "The Companion" (reminds me of the ghost train at Belle Vue amusement gardens in 1970s Manchester, where they'd hung things like fronds of dripping wet seaweed in the dark so they slapped and slithered across your face as the car trundled along...) are among the delights.

Definitely worth a punt and makes me want to investigate some of the other volumes recently released by the British Library.

[dem]

Jun 23, 2019 18:08:00 GMT Shrink Proof said:

.... Ramsay Campbell's "The Companion" (reminds me of the ghost train at Belle Vue amusement gardens in 1970s Manchester, where they'd hung things like fronds of dripping wet seaweed in the dark so they slapped and slithered across your face as the car trundled along...) are among the delights.

Jun 23, 2012 20:49:25 GMT ramseycampbell said:

Well then, here's a shot from the location of "The Companion"...

" .... The rest of the Merseyside area is less fraught, but there are things to watch out for. Waterloo looks across the bay to North Wales, and the view brings a grave­yard, or at least one of its denizens, closer to home than the viewer would like. On the Wirral peninsula, New Brighton used to have two funfairs, the older of which offered a ghost train ride that was, I fear, endless. I once read that story to an audience of ladies in Wallasey, and at the end the lady who had run the old ghost train introduced herself and took my hand." - Ramsey Campbell, Meet My Shadows, Ghost Story Society Newsletter # 7, March 1991

[dem]

Could be I'm not in a receptive mood, but I've been struggling with the Victorian-Edwardian content.

Perceval Langdon - Railhead: (Raw Edges, 1908). A telegram requesting urgent police assistance prevents an audacious wages snatch from Enderton Station. But who - or what - sent it. And how?

Not exactly a second Thurnley Abbey, and I found this next ever so slushy.

T. G. Jackson - A Romance On The Piccadilly Tube: (Six Ghost Stories, 1919). Encouraged by the ghost of Mr. Harvey, the kindly family lawyer, George Markham does the decent thing, hands over his father's "lost" amended will, even though he stands to lose a fortune by doing so. Ultimately it matters nothing as, like Mr. Harvey, George comes a cropper on the underground.

[Shrink Proof]

Jul 3, 2019 18:40:08 GMT dem said:

Could be I'm not in a receptive mood, but I've been struggling with the Victorian-Edwardian content.

Hang in there. I found that the better ones came later. Rather like trains, in fact...

[dem]

Mary Louisa Molesworth - The Man With A Cough: (Longman's Magazine, March 1894). International espionage. Young Ludwig Schmidt is entrusted with delivering the top secret documents to London. He achieves his purpose thanks to the intervention of a bronchitic phantom railway passenger.

Perhaps too much exposure to 'twenties Weird Tales lunacy over past year has destroyed my capacity to enjoy anything even vaguely sensible (not that The Man With The Cough qualifies).

Victor L. Whitechurch - The Strange Story of Engine Number 651: (Royal Magazine, Dec. 1902). The ghost of a murdered fireman haunts locomotive engine 651. Jim Saunders will not desist until his score is settled with the self-styled love rival who hurled him from the cab and into the path of the up train at Long Marsh. Quite liked this one!

[dem]

W. G. Kelly - A Smoking Ghost: (The Argonaut, 4 March 1885). Three years dead and desperate for a drag, an elemental purloins the pipe, tobacco, and, for duration of a smoke, body of a bewildered railway passenger. Insult is added to injury when the victim cops a fine.

Anonymous - A Desperate Run: (The Mistletoe Bough, Christmas, 1878). Midnight on the Ashbourne line. The points-man's ghost prevents a head on collision between two passenger trains. Fortunately he's not omnipresent, otherwise our busybody do-gooder would have ruined this next one as well.

L. G. Moberby - A Strange Night: (South Wales Echo, 28 Sept. 1897). Why has such a pretty Alpen village been abandoned? The community have been driven out by the nightly re-enactment of a fatal collision between goods and passenger trains courtesy of a drunken signalman pining for his lost love.

[Shrink Proof]

Jul 4, 2019 7:24:27 GMT dem said:

Victor L. Whitechurch - The Strange Story of Engine Number 651: (Royal Magazine, Dec. 1902). The ghost of a murdered fireman haunts locomotive engine 651. Jim Saunders will not desist until his score is settled with the self-styled love rival who hurled him from the cab and into the path of the up train at Long Marsh. Quite liked this one!

Well, Victor L. Whitechurch was another in the long, long line of British odd-balls. A clergyman (obviously, given his surname...), he wrote all manner of fiction, including detective stories featuring Thorpe Hazell. Thorpe Hazell was not, as you might think on first hearing, a sleepy village in the English countryside, but was actually a detective that Whitechurch intendended to be as far away from Sherlock Holmes as possible. So he was a vegetarian railway detective....

Whitechurch apparently submitted his crime stories to Scotland Yard so that they could check them for accuracy on police procedures. He was also highly knowledgeable on the intricacies of railway technology and operation (operation of steam locos, signalling, that sort of stuff), to the extent that some of his tales were first published in "Railway Magazine" of all places.

As an even more pedantic footnote, he regularly features in lists compiled by those remarking on the weirdly high percentage of clergymen who are/were fascinated by railways.

[cauldronbrewer]

Jun 2, 2019 18:17:39 GMT Shrink Proof said:

Verdict so far - good rather than great, though I suspect that it's going to get creepier as it progresses.

I'm five stories into The Platform Edge and agree with that verdict so far. The tales I've read are heavy on the Ghost with a Purpose theme, but they're respectable contributions to the field. I particularly liked the abandoned village from "A Strange Night." I'm also grateful to editor Mike Ashley for omitting "The Signalman"--which, like he says, is a good story but not exactly in need of reprinting.

[cauldronbrewer]

With one story left to go, I'm finding I don't have much to say about The Platform Edge. With a few exceptions, the stories seem to fall into the gray area where they're pleasant enough to read but not inspiring enough to stick in my memory.

Jul 3, 2019 18:40:08 GMT dem said:

I found this next ever so slushy.

T. G. Jackson - A Romance On The Piccadilly Tube: (Six Ghost Stories, 1919). Encouraged by the ghost of Mr. Harvey, the kindly family lawyer, George Markham does the decent thing, hands over his father's "lost" amended will, even though he stands to lose a fortune by doing so. Ultimately it matters nothing as, like Mr. Harvey, George comes a cropper on the underground.

The lowlight of the book for me: a tedious tale about a legal dispute between two unsympathetic brothers, with occasional appearances by a forgettable ghost.

Jun 23, 2019 18:08:00 GMT Shrink Proof said:

Now finished, so, as promised, an update. Generally pretty good I reckon. Nearly all stuff I hadn't read before, which always helps. A surprisingly spooky tale by F Scott Fitzgerald of all people, an intriguing story "A Subway Named Möbius" which envisages the Underground as a topologist's nightmare, a (sadly) rather ho-hum tale by the often excellent Rosemary Timperley, Ramsay Campbell's "The Companion" (reminds me of the ghost train at Belle Vue amusement gardens in 1970s Manchester, where they'd hung things like fronds of dripping wet seaweed in the dark so they slapped and slithered across your face as the car trundled along...) are among the delights.

I'm planning to read the Fitzgerald story tonight; I disliked The Great Gatsby, but Dr. Proof's judgment gives me hope. I'd already read "The Companion"; it's one of my favorite Campbell stories. I agree that "A Subway Named Möbius" is one of the book's highlights. Given its theme, it could also fit well in the British Library's upcoming Dangerous Dimensions: Mind-Bending Tales of the Mathematic Weird anthology.

Speaking of which: has anyone seen a table of contents for that book? Judging by the description, it sounds as though Dr. Strange is correct that it will include Blackwood's "A Victim of Higher Space" and Long's "Hounds of Tindalos," but after that I'm uncertain. The "non-Euclidian geometry" suggests Lovecraft (which would fit with Dr. S's guess of "Dreams in the Witch House"). For Borges, maybe "Funes the Memorious" (which includes a bizarre counting system)? I can't recall reading anything by Miriam Allen deFord.

'I have stood on the dim shore beyond time and matter and seen it. It moves through strange curves and outrageous angles. Some day I shall travel in time and meet it face to face.'

Unlike nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, which tends to fixate on the past, the haunted and the ghostly, early weird fiction probes the very boundaries of reality the laws and limits of time, space and matter. Here, unimaginable terrors lurk in hitherto unknown mirror dimensions, calamities in ultra-space threaten to wipe clean all evidence of our universe and experiments in non-Euclidean geometry lead to sickening consequences.

In twelve speculative tales of our universe's mathematics and physics gone awry, this new anthology presents an abundance of curiosities and terrors with stories from Jorge Luis Borges, Miriam Allen deFord, Frank Belknap Long and Algernon Blackwood.

[Dr Strange]

Jan 6, 2021 0:52:19 GMT cauldronbrewer said:

I agree that "A Subway Named Möbius" is one of the book's highlights. Given its theme, it could also fit well in the British Library's upcoming Dangerous Dimensions: Mind-Bending Tales of the Mathematic Weird anthology.

Speaking of which: has anyone seen a table of contents for that book?

'I have stood on the dim shore beyond time and matter and seen it. It moves through strange curves and outrageous angles. Some day I shall travel in time and meet it face to face.'

Unlike nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, which tends to fixate on the past, the haunted and the ghostly, early weird fiction probes the very boundaries of reality the laws and limits of time, space and matter. Here, unimaginable terrors lurk in hitherto unknown mirror dimensions, calamities in ultra-space threaten to wipe clean all evidence of our universe and experiments in non-Euclidean geometry lead to sickening consequences.

In twelve speculative tales of our universe's mathematics and physics gone awry, this new anthology presents an abundance of curiosities and terrors with stories from Jorge Luis Borges, Miriam Allen deFord, Frank Belknap Long and Algernon Blackwood.

There's still no contents listed anywhere for this that I can find, though it's supposed to be out in the UK in a couple of weeks. After looking at that description, I was trying to think of some weird (as opposed to SF) stories about time travel or time slips. I know I've read at least one where "ghosts" or "demons" seen in some olden-day setting turn out to be visions of our present day (possibly by Nigel Kneale? - it sounds like him), but can't remember any titles.

[johnnymains]

contents are:

The Plattner Story - H.G. Wells
The Hall Bedroom - Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
Space - John Buchan
A Victim of Higher Space - Algernon Blackwood
The Pikestaff Case - Algernon Blackwood
The Hounds of Tindalos - Frank Belknap Long
The Trap - Henry S Whitehead and HP Lovecraft
The Living Equation - Nat Schachner
Infinity Zero - Donald Wanderei
The Library of Babel - Jorge Luis Borges
"—And He Built a Crooked House—" - Robert Heinlein
Slips Take Over - Miriam Allen deFord

[dem]

Jan 6, 2021 0:52:19 GMT cauldronbrewer said:

With one story left to go, I'm finding I don't have much to say about The Platform Edge. With a few exceptions, the stories seem to fall into the gray area where they're pleasant enough to read but not inspiring enough to stick in my memory.

Can only agree. I much prefer 'Richard Peyton's The Ghost Now Standing on Platform One selection, which, to be fair, also includes several nice but unmemorable items. As with Mr. Finch's 'Terror Tales,' the blend of fiction and 'non-fiction' works to its advantage.

[helrunar]

This thread is reminding me of a Monty Python skit set vaguely either in the Edwardian era or the 1920s. It was a drawing room murder mystery denouement, that involved Carol Cleveland and others citing absurdly specific arrival and departure times for various trains. ("But she couldn't have gotten the nine oh seven out of Little Storping because it doesn't even stop at that platform, and in any event doesn't even pass through Coughing Pudding until nine-fourteen!" "Ah, but you're forgetting that she could have taken the nine-oh-four from Depravity Threadles ... it's only a seven minute walk if you cut through the cow-path along the side of the station!") It was knowledge of those times upon which the solution of the mystery depended. I was talking to a friend about this (and it was nearly 50 years ago, so why I recall the conversation at all is baffling, considering how much I have forgotten since) and he said the skit was a send up of some obscure author, one of the Ethel M Dell's of beyond yesteryear...

cheers, H.