OK, so, hopefully someone will be able to elaborate on this, and tell whether there's any truth to it. I was told this story a few years ago (between 1999 and 2001) by a resident in a care home I worked at who was en ex-railway man.
He told me that no trains are permitted to ever pass through the Standedge Tunnels near Huddersfield travelling eastwards between 10:05 and 10:15 at night, ever. The reason was that strange things had happened to trains in the tunnels between these times. Namely that all electric lights, and previously even gas / paraffin lamps, always extinguished shortly after entering the tunnel, and the train would mysteriously feel like it's trying to slow or stop. The enginemen always had to fight the controls in the dark to keep the train moving, as they always felt an instinct that if the train stopped then something terrible would happen. This only ever happened when trains were travelling eastwards in the tunnel between five-past-ten and quarter-past-ten at night. After numerous incidents over the years, British Rail management declared a moratorium on such movements between those times in the mid to late 1980s, and as no train has ever passed through between those times since, no further incidents have ever been reported. The old man told me that there had been records throughout the time of the nationalised railways of these incident occurring, and some records from before nationalisation, but it wasn't until (for him) relatively recently that the reports were taken seriously, and BR issued the moratorium on such movements.
I've checked several times and never found anything written about this on-line. I'd actually forgotten it until I recently took a trip to York from Manchester and passed through the tunnel and the memory came back to me of my old resident.
