The Train Entombed in The Tunnel Myth
There is a rumour that in one of the sealed tunnels in the area, an engine or carriage remains hidden collecting dust. Another version of the story, popular amongst local schoolchildren, claims that the High Level station was closed because a commuter train was trapped by a tunnel collapse, entombing the passengers who remain there to this day.
These stories are an example of the extraordinary persistence of local urban legend. The story of the entombed train was apparently current in the 1930s. Back then it referred to the abandoned 1860s pneumatic railway on the north side of the grounds of Crystal Palace Park. See Crystal Palace pneumatic railway for more information.
Most traces of this had almost certainly been destroyed by the building works for the 1911 Festival of Empire, but there was an unsuccessful archaeological dig for the train sponsored by the BBC's Nationwide current affairs programme in the 1970s.
Read more about this topic: Crystal Palace (High Level) Railway Station
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Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,
No matter where it’s going.”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
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—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
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—Samuel Fuller (b. 1911)
“That, of course, was the thing about the fifties with all their patina of familial bliss: A lot of the memories were not happy, not mine, not my friends’. That’s probably why the myth so endures, because of the dissonance in our lives between what actually went on at home and what went on up there on those TV screens where we were allegedly seeing ourselves reflected back.”
—Anne Taylor Fleming (20th century)