The Devil's Loco Poem by David Lewis Paget

I live by an ancient railway track
Near the village of Nether Stonely,
Though the trains were left in the distant past,
And the ribbon of track is lonely,
The rails are rusted, covered in weeds
And lead to an old stone tunnel,
That squads of Victorian engineers
Once sealed to the height of a funnel.

As lads, we'd clamber up to the top
And peer through the gap left up there,
Into the pitch of the blackness, where
You could still get a whiff of sulphur.
We'd shout ‘Hello! ' there, into the dark,
And listen to hear the echo
Bounce off the curve of the soot-black walls
That seemed to be whispering ‘Loco! '

The legend went that a local lad
In '93, in the winter,
Had followed his dog as it chased a hare,
They'd all been seen to go in there,
A tank, a 2.4.2 went in
To the dark of the old stone tunnel,
With sparks and smoke obscuring the view
As sulphur poured from its funnel.

It didn't come out from the other side,
The boy never reappeared,
The company suddenly closed off the line
With that bevy of engineers,
The loco was written right off from the books,
They said it had gone to the knackers,
And secretive meetings were held at the docks
With directors, and all of their backers!

I slipped right over that wall at ten,
But nobody would believe me,
And felt my way through the darkness then
As my eyes, they thought to deceive me,
A loco, cold, and covered in rust
Stood silent there in the tunnel,
And under the front, a skeleton crushed,
As dead as the old train's funnel!

On winter days when a fog or haze
Comes down, I can hear it barking,
A dog in chase of a hare, and then
The sound of a young boy laughing,
And then the rumble and chuff of a train
Drifts faintly over the meadow,
As I cover my ears to muffle the scream
And the sound of the Devil's Loco!