Weird train-related dreams

[Galvanize]

I was walking from a Park area to “Elm Park” underground station, and crossed a Railway Bridge, expecting it to be the GEML…I could see the District and London-Southend line in the distance, with a connecting spur linking the two.

Very quickly a train was approaching…what I expected to be a GA 745 on a Norwich bound working. However, it was an Italian Freccariarossa 100…that looked really cool. Then, coming off the spur, an Enterprise liveried Class 201 hauling The Northern Belle!

The mind works in very odd ways.

 

[Calthrop]

An odd one last night -- featuring the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch; which was per dream, functioning in east London -- either having been transplanted wholesale, or very greatly extended ... travel thereon in east London, featured: including a long, unscheduled stop -- explained as being the result of a sudden crisis which the railway's top management had to discuss and resolve, before traffic could resume. This was intermixed with a non-railway theme involving me and a female colleague in a former job, half a lifetime ago -- with whom I got along well, but did not fancy in the slightest, and who was in any case "taken". In my dream, said lady was unattached, I was madly smitten with her, and was trying timidly and ineffectively, to woo her.

 

[Tracked]

I was on my village (Bentley) high street with a few people I know, they were going for the train into Doncaster and I decided to go to the station with them, with the intention of going to Hull, knowing I had plenty of time to get a ticket before the 08:45 service arrived, and that I'd have plenty of time in Doncaster for the change of train as the Hull one left at 09:20.

Only thing was, when I got on the station it wasn't my local slab of concrete with a bus shelter station, it was an older looking one with canopies and was now called Bishopsgate.

I went to the ticket machine to get a ticket, but I had to also type in this stations name as well as Hull, and it kept spelling it wrong ...

There was an information desk, with a couple more ticket machines. These seemed to have a fault of googling the originating station when I typed it in. As I was sorting out the ticket my train arrived, it was a 142 in the yellow/cream Merseyrail livery.

Must've made the train, as the next thing I knew I was in Hull (although it didn't look like Hull).

 

[32475]

I was on holiday in Cambodia a few weeks ago and although I didn’t get to see any railways there I had read up on what does exist and plans to rebuild some lines which were wrecked after years of war and strife.
Hence the dream I had last night in which I saw a reopened line with a Hastings DEMU running past en route to Phnom Penh!

 

[AlistairCowell]

I dreamed last night about me being inside a very small railway exhibition with a small cafe, with a sandish-ground space outside bordered by a wooden fence (possibly a car park). There was a model of a Class 320 in early SPT livery inside the exhibition, similar to what 320307 had. A small railway exhibition was inside the green wooden hut, about the size of a 40ft container.

In that very same dream I went to the end of the platform when a three-car Class 156 DMU arrived, it was unit 156477 and it was hauling three Mk1 coaches in Blood and Custard livery.

In an earlier dream, I was in a fictional countryside somewhere in the Scottish Borders or South Lanarkshire, and I visited an antique place with a long oval model rail track, before heading towards the street with houses and trees east of the village in a golden light.

 

[Purple Train]

I was on a Travelcard to clear some traction when I made a decision to take a 197 instead of another unit (can't remember which) to Queen's Park to clear. Unfortunately, disruption meant it was diverted, first stop Earlestown, with no trains back into Manchester for half an hour.

And no, I haven't made any typos!

 

[185143]

Had a wierd one today. I'm on nights, hence "today".

I was on a steam charter on the Chat Moss line heading out of Liverpool, casually sat in a Mk1 enjoying a few beers I'd brought on with me. I was hoping to use my Saveaway to Huyton on the charter, presumably for the novelty factor as I'm not a fan of steam at all.

The guard came through and she wouldn't accept my Saveaway obviously, so I asked to buy a part fare to Huyton. She pulled out one of the modern day bog roll ticket machines and chung me £4.50 for a part fare to Huyton. (I had no idea what the fare to Huyton was. It's not a ticket I'd ever buy as I'd use a Saveaway for that journey. I've just checked and it's £3.70 at full fare).

As I paid (by card!) I noticed us roll through Huyton station, however it had Prescot on the signage. Also, we were on the wrong line. I questioned this and the guard told me the driver had experienced poor rail adhesion and didn't feel it safe to stop, so we were carrying on. I asked when the next stop was and she told me St. Helens, and to enjoy the journey.

I went to go and find the buffet car and that's when it ended.

 

[Cambus731]

Dreamt list night that some national rail trains had started running ECS along the Hammersmith & City line to access a depot in the Westbourne Park area. And to increase capacity a loop had been constructed by passing Edgware Road Station to the north.

 

[Along the bay]

I was at James Street waiting for the 777 home to Chester. en route, I was ejected from the train and had to walk to Rock Ferry through a forest. When I arrived, as it turned out, the line to Chester hadn't been electrified yet and TFW 197s were running up the line. Having missed the train to Caerphillery in South Wales (first stop Cardiff Central), I decided to wait half an hour for the train to Llandudno.

 

[MerlinRail 804]

Probably had more, but the only one I remember is when I was quite young being at an unknown SWT station and my parents got on a train and I didn’t get to that point. No one knows what happened afterwards.
Said dream almost managed to become reality a few years later as we were travelling to East Grinstead for the Bluebell railway, with a train from Victoria in a couple minutes, sprinting, my brother got on, three left on the platform. Just when all hope was lost, a complete stranger pressed the door open button and the doors opened (I thought they were locked though). Nothing to do with our peril, they just had a question for the dispatcher about their ticket (I think).

Little brains, little seconds, little miracles!

 

[Purple Train]

I was, for some reason, randomly driving north (by car), when I found myself descending a hill and entering the town of Shifnal. There were two gigantic office blocks to my left, with a double-arrow sign at the street corner. I, however, turned right (abandoning the car at some point), along a narrow industrial not-much-more-than-a-pavement that could have been called Roadkill View. As I was walking, with no target in mind, the number of people around me suddenly swelled, as if they were materialising out of thin air. At this point, Jeremy Clarkson drove slowly past in some kind of ancient sports car, closely followed by Richard Hammond, who hit a derelict single-storey brick building, which collapsed into rubble around his car. Leaving Hammond to work out how to get out of the car, I carried on walking down the road as it turned into a footpath, and eventually found a fence, on the other side of which was the railway line. Well, I say I found a fence - a large hole had been cut in it, and Clarkson was positioning his car on the track before speeding away towards Shifnal station! I remember wondering if he would activate the track circuits, but the dream then ended.

I've never been to Shifnal, but, from what I can gather from various Internet browsings, I don't think it's possible to have a more inaccurate mental image of it!

 

[Sad Sprinter]

I had the misfortune of having the terribly sad dream last night, involving a journey on the jubilee line and finding out, to my surprise, they had replaced the announcement for the stop at North Greenwich by splicing in an archaically worded ancient recording of a VERA announcement announcing to "change here for the Millennium Dome". Shouldn't have gone to bed thinking about the last remaining VERA recording in the lifts at Lambeth North - sad or what?

I don't even like the VERA recordings, I think they sound creepy.

 

[nw1]

A couple recently.

First was last night. I was at York Station, which looked reasonably like the real thing. A train drew into the westernmost through platform which I understood to be a Cross-Country from Portsmouth Harbour to York, and I also understood the current Cross-Country pattern on the Reading-North East axis to involve a two-hourly Portsmouth-York service. Oddly, despite me understanding that it terminated at York, I remember noting passengers on it as it pulled out. I remember it was quite lightly-loaded but the middle part of the train was quite full. I also remember it consisted of three units, each 3 or 4 cars, and the total length was 10 or 11 coaches. These units did not resemble any real unit classes I know of, but had something of a TGV-like look about them. One unit had a red-and-silver livery and the other two blue-and-silver. The rear unit had a "nose"-like design (class 37-esque) and had a four-digit number and most bizarrely of all, there were one or two freight wagons attached to the back.

The second one, a week or two back, was set not in York, but in New York. I was coming into New York on an Inter-City of some kind from further west in the USA, and remember being disappointed that much of the journey was underground (and I recall sleeping as a result). I woke up in a tunnel purportedly coming into "New York Station" (which was neither Grand Central nor Penn, but some other station; it was a terminus) and saw a notice in the tunnel reading "NOW ENTERING EAST SIDE". Then the train came out of the tunnel and passed a park; I remember noting it was autumn, but despite it being October the trees were semi-bare and resembled November. But then, bizarrely, the train entered countryside at quite a high elevation and continued for a couple of miles across green fields with a river valley to the left perhaps 100 metres below the level of the railway. So in this alternate New York, there was an island of countryside within the urban area. Bizarrely this alternative New York geography, with an elevated area of countryside in the midst of the urban area, is a recurring dream; it's come to me before, albeit without the railway. Finally the railway arrived on a hill crest and I could see the main part of Manhattan ahead, with the Empire State Building, and sea further ahead. The top of the hill was about the same elevation above sea level as the top of the Empire State Building, so perhaps 400 metres odd.

I knew the train would be terminating at New York Station very soon but then I woke up...

There was no Hudson River in this alternate New York, but an altered geographical layout, and the train was arriving into central Manhattan from the east despite originating further west in the USA. The geography was perhaps a headland, protruding southwards and then westwards, on which New York was situated and a bay separating it and the land to the west, with the train taking a big curve along this headland to enter New York.

 

[MerlinRail 804]

Started off in a TL 700 at an unidentified location between Paddington and Reading. At another unidentified location on the same line, on the fast lines, it stops. I get off and go to a bay platform where a GW 158 awaits, with a destination beginning with E, I think Exeter. The train just sits there, and I don’t remember anything past that. As with all my dreams, not much is remembered except the weird bits.

 

[Calthrop]

Last night -- dream in which I was one of a group organised by a railway society: visiting an industrial-railway preservation site, with steam working -- a bit like the 2-ft-gauge Statfold Barn Railway near Tamworth, though it wasn't that actual venue. My fellow-group members were rather grumpy and taciturn middle-aged or elderly gents: party's leader was the (benignly) eccentric old chap who taught me French and German at school, some sixty years ago. For this expedition, we were all riding bicycles -- doing so, over quite a considerable distance -- a number of miles -- to get to the rather remote venue. I, not a good cyclist, fell quite a way behind the rest of the party: by the time I arrived at the site, all the others had moved on to the actual scene of action, and were enjoying the rides behind steam. In the site's "admittance office", I needed to establish my credentials with the curmudgeonly guy who was manning the "entry desk": to get admitted, I needed to tell him the name of the society which was running the visit -- a short and simple name, which however I had totally forgotten, rack my brains though I might. The desk-man rather offensively refused me entry, or any kind of assistance -- I had to remain in the lobby, feeling increasingly thwarted and frustrated.

It came about ultimately, that a member of the party came back into the lobby; I begged him for help -- there followed a business of trying to speak with the leader, who was out there at the scene of action: this via a mobile-phone-type device, or earlier-technology approximate equivalent -- neither of us were able with this thing, to achieve contact with the leader well enough to converse understandably with him. I then became aware that in my agitation, I had been scuffing-up with my foot, the not-very-substantially-made carpet in the office -- pretty much ruining a section of said carpet. My feelings of utter mortification at having done this -- plus fear that the desk-man was, because of it, about to "erupt" at me in great fury -- were totally eclipsing concerns about getting into where the steam doings were happening. I then woke up -- probably, just as well ...

 

[nw1]

I had one set in east London/Essex the other day.

For some reason I had travelled to Shenfield, except that the Shenfield in the dream was very urban and located approximately where Barking is in real life. However this "Shenfield" was still on the GEML.

I remember waiting at the station for a return train to London, on the up platform which was the northernmost one (so trains used the right-hand tracks, as in Germany, etc). But trains were few and far between and I remember speaking to someone and there was a strike on. I do remember expecting the train to be a 720 (a class I've never seen in real life).

I then left the station to make my way to the nearby Underground station, down a few streets reminiscent of the Clapham Junction area. I got a Tube train towards central London but then got off in another suburb further in, which might have been Barking, Romford or Hornchurch, or somewhere else (I forget where but it was a real Eastern suburb).

I then noticed a viaduct over a valley to the north in a green area, and had it in my mind that I wanted to walk round some well-known green area, which this was. I somehow got up to the viaduct, which was made of white stone and perhaps 50-100 metres above the valley. It carried a path, rather than a road or a railway. This led eastwards into a green open area and I vividly saw stony, white hills-cum-mountains around 300 metres high to the east, which I recognised as the little known "hills of Essex". I think this is based on some real low hills in Essex which I've seen on the map, albeit neither stony nor 300 metres high.

I then started recognising I was dreaming (I get lucid dreams quite often) and spent some time drinking in the scene, knowing I would wake up shortly.

The only Shenfield connection I can think of is that in the 80s I remember thinking I'd like to spend a day there observing the motley collection of older EMUs which one could see on the GEML at the time. I did pass through the real Shenfield once - in 2001 on a 312 - but didn't alight.

 

[Sorcerer]

Wanted to get in on the train-related dreams thing based on some I recently had. The other day I had a strange dream where I was on a train and passed a Pendolino in the old Arriva Trains Wales livery parked up in a siding new Crewe for some kind of new open access operator. But interestingly I had a similar dream a few weeks ago where I saw Pendolinos in three different liveries at Warrington Bank Quay with the lore that Avanti had some of their operations sold to some open access operators including one named after John F. Kennedy. Probably not the strangest train-related dream posted here but still a quirky interesting pair to say the least.

 

[brad465]

Last night I dreamt about Southeastern taking on a Class 373 to run peak buster services on HS1 between St Pancras and Ashford.