All Aboard the Crystal Palace Ghost Train!

Back when Crystal Palace in South London was still the home of the Crystal Palace Great Exhibition (it was destroyed by fire in 1936) it was a popular visitor attraction supported by a number of rail services, including the short lived Crystal Palace Pneumatic Railway, a kind of Victorian precursor of Elon Musk's Hyperloop high speed mass transit system.

It was an experimental system, pioneered by Thomas Webster Rammell, to test the viability of vacuum driven trains. Imagine a straw in a glass of water: when you suck, the water goes in one direction, when you blow it goes the opposite way. Powered by compressed air generated by a steam engine, the train could travel 550 yards of track in about 50 seconds. There was, incidentally, a large bristle 'collar' at the back of the train to stop the air escaping, more about that in a moment.

​Although the service attracted a lot of customers, it only ran for a couple of months, ending in October 1864. But as to why it stopped, this has never been adequately explained.

One suggestion is it was only ever intended to be a short term test of the technology, which would then be used at a later date for full sized tube trains elsewhere in London. Another suggestion is the bristle collar, covered in gunk made of animal or vegetable fats to create an airtight seal, was a little too attractive to rodents who nibbled away at it, with the result the collar required constant maintenance.

There is also a theory a downturn in the economy may have deterred financial backers from investing any further money in the project.

But then there's the urban myth which says it stopped running because there was a disastrous crash and the whole train was buried, literally, as part of a subsequent cover-up.

The suggestion is the air pump system failed and everybody on the train died horribly "like frogs under a vacuum pump," as one newspaper had warned when the service first launched.

After that, the both the tunnel and the train were buried until, in 1978, a woman walking her dog said she found a part of the tunnel, peered inside... and saw within it an old railway carriage still filled with skeletons in Victorian clothes!