Every train is offered to you before it comes. The box up the line rings a code, you accept it, and then it arrives. For eleven years my box was offered one that nobody had sent yet.
I worked a manual signal box on a single line branch for eleven years, and I want to explain how the bell works before I explain what was wrong with mine, because if you do not understand the bell then the rest of it is just a man in a box saying he heard something.
It is not a warning. That is the thing people get wrong. The bell is not there to tell you a train is coming. The bell is there so that a train cannot come until you have said yes.
The box up the line from me was Ardleigh Crossing. If Ardleigh had a train for me, the signalman there would send a code on the bell: two beats, then a pause, then one. That is is-line-clear-for-a-stopping-passenger-train. I would hear it, I would look at my instruments and my block section and my own road, and if everything was right I would repeat the same code back. Two, pause, one. That is the acceptance. Only then does he pull off his signal and only then does the train move into my section.
Then he sends two beats to say train entering section, and I watch it come round the cutting, and when the tail lamp has gone past my window I send two beats and one beat back to say train out of section, and the section is empty again and we start over.
That is the whole job. Offer, accept, enter, clear. It has been that since before anybody's grandfather and it works because it is slow and it is spoken out loud in a language with about forty words in it.
The important part, for what comes next, is that the offer always comes first. Always. There is no such thing as a train that arrives before it was offered. If one did, it would mean two men had both been wrong at the same time in the same way, and that has happened perhaps four times in the history of the railway, and they write books about those four times.
I took over the box at Wenn Sidings in the spring, on nights, six on to six off, four nights a week.
The branch was quiet by then. Six stopping services a day, a fertiliser working twice a week, and after ten at night nothing at all until the newspaper train at ten past four in the morning. So a night turn was one train, in and out, and eleven hours of the kettle and the register and the wind on the window.
The register is the other thing to explain. You write it all down. Every bell code, both directions, with the time to the minute, in a ruled book, in ink. It is a legal document. If anything ever happens, the register is what they read.
So there is a record. I am not asking anybody to take my word for any of this. There are eleven years of registers in a store in Doncaster with my handwriting in them and the whole of it is written down in the ordinary way because I wrote it down in the ordinary way, because what else do you do.
Here is what happened, the first time, in the October of my first year.
Twenty to two in the morning. Nothing due until ten past four. I was sat with the paper.
The bell went. Two beats, a pause, one beat. Is line clear for a stopping passenger train.
I want to be careful here, because this is the part where you decide whether to keep listening. It was not faint. It was not a noise that could have been the pipes or the wind or a bird on the wire. It was the bell, struck twice and then once, at the weight and spacing a man's hand makes, and I had heard it four hundred times that year already.
I did what you do. I looked at my block instrument, which was showing line blocked, normal, correct. I looked out at the section and there was nothing in it. And I put my hand on the tapper to repeat the code back, and then I did not, because there was no train.
I rang Ardleigh on the telephone instead, which is a separate thing from the bell, and I said, did you just offer me something.
He said no. He said he had been sat doing nothing for two hours the same as me.
I said I have had two and one on the bell.
He said, check your batteries.
I checked my batteries. I had the S and T lads out the following week and they went through the line wire, the tapper, the bell itself, the earth, all of it, and they found nothing, which they wrote on a card and left with me, and I have that card too.
And nothing happened again until the February.
Twenty to two in the morning. Two beats, a pause, one beat.
And then the third time, in the August, and by then I had started to notice the thing that made me stop sleeping properly on my off days.
It was always twenty to two. Not about twenty to. At one forty exactly by the box clock, which is a railway clock and which is right.
And it was always a stopping passenger train.
I need to say the next part flatly.
Nineteen weeks after that August one, they put a diversion on while they did the bridge at Ardleigh, and for eleven nights the newspaper train came down my branch instead of its own road, and it was retimed, and the retiming they gave it was one forty three.
Which meant that on the first of those eleven nights, at twenty to two, Ardleigh offered me a train.
Two beats, a pause, one beat.
I accepted it. I sent two and one back, and my hand did not want to do it, and I did it, and the train came round the cutting eight minutes later with its lamps on, and it went through, and I cleared the section, and I wrote it in the register in ink like everything else.
Then I sat down on the floor of my own box, which I have never done before or since, and I worked out that the bell in October had been three hundred and eighteen days early.
It has happened nine times in eleven years. I have the dates and I have checked every one of them and I will give you what I found.
Seven of the nine were followed, later, by a real stopping passenger train offered to me at exactly that time on that piece of line. Sometimes weeks later. Twice more than a year later. The diversion, an engineers' special, a charter, a summer Saturday extra that ran for one season and never again.
The eighth was never followed by anything. I have looked. There is no train.
The ninth was the last one, in the March before I finished, and it was not two and one.
It was six beats, a pause, then one. That is the code you never want to send and mostly never will. It means obstruction danger.
I telephoned Ardleigh. He was asleep in his chair and cross about it and there was nothing wrong on his road, and there was nothing wrong on mine, and I walked my section with a lamp in the dark until half past four which is against every rule there is, and there was nothing on the line. Nothing.
I finished in the June. Voluntary. Nobody pushed me.
I am not going to tell you it was a ghost, because I do not know what it was, and a signalman who starts saying what he does not know is a signalman who accepts a train into an occupied section one night.
What I will tell you is the thing I have never got round.
The bell cannot be heard from outside the box. It is a small thing, in a wooden case, on a shelf at head height, and the sound of it does not carry past the window. Whatever struck it, struck it in the room I was sitting in.
And it always struck it correctly. Not once in nine times did I hear a code that does not exist. Whatever it was, it knew the language, all forty words of it, and it used it properly, and it used it politely, in the ordinary way, at twenty to two in the morning, to ask me whether the road was clear.
I never found out what for.
The eighth one still has nothing after it. That is the one I think about. Somewhere out there is a stopping passenger train that has been offered and never accepted, and I am the man who did not send the code back, and I have had eleven years to decide whether that was the right thing to do and I still do not know.