When I was a boy, I used to hear the train in the distance in the middle of the night. It broke the stone silence of my world like a knife, a long, lonesome whistle from over the hill next to the Aroostook River Valley, where the tracks ran. It was a sign of life, the Bangor and Aroostook.  I never knew if it was headed north or south. I never saw the night train - I only ever heard its wail. It was reassuring. Even though my neck of the woods was lonely, there were train tracks connecting that loneliness to the wider world, somewhere out there.  I had never been on a train. My parents had taken the B&A to Bangor for their honeymoon, but by the time I was a kid, no passengers rode the rails. Trains were a mystery to me, and I loved them. Once, my father took me to the Allagash to see something strange and wonderful - the ghost trains. In a place with nothing but untamed wilderness as far as the eye could see, we walked a path into the dense forest to discover two steam locomotives just sitting there rusting away as time ticked on. These are mighty machines from the golden age of steam and must have been worth a fortune in their day and yet, at some point in their history, someone left them where they sat, two behemoths of iron nearly a hundred tons each, a hundred miles from any discernible tracks.  I think they serve as a reminder that once, real trains broke through the dense forest, intruding into a wild place that eventually shut them out and left them for dead. Sometimes trains can intrude upon our lives. We’re trying to get somewhere in a hurry and the lights start to flash and the blockade arms go down and we’re waiting for ten minutes while a freight train crosses our path. It’s huge, longer than a skyscraper is tall, and it takes a long time to crawl past us so we can be on our way. The train I heard as a boy intruded on my sleep. But there are trains, some say, that run on their own tracks, on tracks that aren’t even really there, on tracks that were abandoned years ago. These trains shouldn’t even be there, and they intrude upon our reality, our perception of what is possible. I’ve never seen one, but they’ve been reported for well over a century, nearly since the invention of the train itself.  From The New York Times, 1886 “An old story, which may be of interest to the students of psychical research, comes from Old Orchard. Before the Boston and Maine Railroad was extended to Portland, visitors reached Old Orchard by a branch of the Eastern Road. Since the building of the former road’s extension the branch had been abandoned, and no trains have run over it for years. The rails are up, and in many places the roadbed destroyed. Last Summer, as a party of Canadian gentlemen, three in number, were walking along this deserted road, they heard distinctly the rumble of an approaching train. It came nearer and nearer, and yet nothing was seen. As it came close to them, they all involuntarily jumped from the track, and the invisible train passed them, going toward the beach, the sound growing fainter as it went on.  The gentlemen were much frightened, and one was quite overcome by the occurrence. He could not shake off the impression that had been left, and declared that he knew something terrible was to happen. That very afternoon he received a dispatch from friends in Montreal telling him that his wife and only child had been killed by a railroad accident that very forenoon.” What are we to make of this tale? Given the lack of specific information it’s likely it was one of the small stories buried in the New York Times in the late 1880s designed to give the reader a bit of a fright, to appeal, perhaps, to their appreciation of the unknown. Modern journalism isn’t much better and often is written to appeal to emotion rather than to only relate the facts of a happening. It frankly defies belief, but then again, doesn’t every ghost story, everywhere, at any time?  G