Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in Calder Station ·
Harness Without a Train
A porter at Calder Station finds a draught horse waiting at the old platform barrier with its harness buckled to nothing, and the horse will not move until someone climbs up and takes the reins.
Calder Station closed its last passenger platform in the year the Misprint came down, and for most of the time since then the only people who go along the old up-line are the maintenance crew, a few courting couples and the night porter, Ned Oakes, who takes the lamp round the empty waiting rooms at the end of each shift and then sits on the bench under the clock until his relief arrives.
On the night in question the clock stopped at ten past two, which it does sometimes, and Ned got up to wind it. He found the barrier at the end of platform four open, which it never is, and beyond it on the cinder track a horse.
It was a big grey draught animal, the sort the railway used to keep for shunting, with heavy feathered legs and a mane that hung to its chest. Its harness was buckled on correctly: collar, traces, belly band, the leather polished and supple. The traces ran out behind it along the track toward the dark shape of the old goods yard. There was nothing on the end of them. No wagon, no truck, nothing but the empty rails and the dark.
It turned its head and looked at him. Its eyes were very calm.
Ned had worked on the railway for twenty-two years, and he knew that a horse which has been trained to haul will go on hauling as long as there is a load to haul. He also knew, as all the old hands knew, that the horses on Calder line had been retired before he was born. Some of them were still in the stables at the back of the goods shed, dozing in straw. The rest had gone to the knacker's when the diesels came.
He stood on the cinders and looked at the harness, and the horse stood and looked at him, and then it lowered its head and leaned forward into the collar, slowly, the way a horse does when it is waiting for the cart to take up the weight.
The traces tightened. Something behind the horse groaned, a long low metal sound from the dark, as though a very heavy load had been put to the rails and was beginning to move.
Ned understood. The horse was waiting for a driver. It had been waiting, perhaps, for a very long time, and it had been willing to go on waiting, because the trains had never come back and nobody had ever told it that the line was closed. Now there was a man on the platform with a lamp. The horse wanted him to climb up on its back and take the reins and call the command, and then it would pull the load away down the line, into whatever was left of the old railway.
He did not climb up. He went back along the platform to the signal box, which had been locked since the sixties, and found the key on the nail where it had always hung, and used the old telephone to call the depot. The night dispatcher said there was no movement booked on the up-line. He said there was a horse on the cinders at platform four, harnessed to nothing, and the dispatcher laughed in a way that was not entirely a laugh and said he should go home.
When Ned came back to the barrier the horse was still there, leaning. The traces were taut. Behind it the rails hummed faintly, like a train very far off.
He took off his cap. He did not know why. He said, to the animal, that the line was shut and he was sorry, and that it was time to stop pulling. The horse went still. The traces slackened. The horse lifted its head and looked at him for a long moment, and then, with a deliberate, rather dignified step, it turned and walked back along the cinders into the dark toward the goods yard, the empty harness swaying gently at its flanks.
By morning the barrier was closed. The clock had started again. The up-line was clear, the rails were dry, and there was no sign on the cinders of any hoofprints at all. Ned still sits under the clock at the end of each shift, and sometimes, in the small hours, he hears the far-off hum of a load taking up its weight, and he finishes his tea and does not go to look.