Last week Thameslink gave us Mirage Trains.  Each Mirage Train was shown as ‘On Time’ right up until the moment it was supposed to leave, but then the departure time was put back minute by minute until – Pffttt !!! – it vanished from the schedule without trace.

This week Thameslink have devised a new game for us.  Late on Monday night the new A – Z screen at Sevenoaks just showed “—” for Bat & Ball and Otford, and no Thameslink departures were shown on the chronological displays.  No trains, no replacement buses, Nada, Zilch, Nil, Zero, Nowt, Nothing.  Tough, Shanks’s pony or get a taxi was the gist.

However, there was a 700 train at Platform 4 with a driver in the cab and London Blackfriars on its headboard display. 

Sure enough, at bang on 2152 the staff blew their whistles and it glided silently away into the night like the Marie Celeste.  Even more curiously, RealTimeTrains has no report of this Ghost Train secretly leaving Sevenoaks, but it mysteriously materialised at Bat & Ball right on time and even managed to reach Blackfriars a couple of minutes early.  Were there any passengers on board, or had they been turned into pumpkins en route?

Reading the runes, it appears that the 2152 had originally been cancelled but then secretly reinstated (complete with First Class this time around !)  But that’s not much use when Thameslink can’t even be bothered to tell passengers that it will be running.

Strange things were also happening in the Twilight Zone outside the station: a completely unlit vehicle with a blacked-out headboard was lurking in the bus stop lay-by.  From a distance it looked like an ambulance.  Was it waiting there ready to revive any collapsing passengers who had staggered in from Bat & Ball and Otford ?  Or was it perhaps some alien agency spying on the station and reporting back to the mother ship on how Britain had been brought to its knees by their devilish plan to paralyse the country’s rail network?

Closer inspection revealed a moving dot pattern in a strange yellow light emanating from its the side and visible only when standing next to it:    Rail Replacement Service. It was a Go-Coach Secret Bus – but who would have found it?