Regional legend · 3 min read · Set in The Kessin Crossing ·
Why the Crossing Keepers Whistle
The keepers at the Kessin level crossing whistle a short falling tune at every train that passes, and the tune is older than the railway, and the keepers say that anyone who stops whistling will have to take the next train through.
- status: folklore
The level crossing at Kessin has been manned by the same families since the line was first laid through the reach in 1861, and every keeper who has worked the gates there has whistled the same tune. It is a short falling phrase, five notes, the last one held and dropped by a fifth, and it is sung through the teeth at the approach of every train. The timetable does not require it. The railway's own rules do not mention it. The keepers whistle it anyway, at the gate, with their hands on the wheel, and they will not say why.
The old keepers in the village say the tune is older than the railway. It was whistled on the Kessin road long before the iron came, by drovers bringing cattle across the moor, and by carters with loads of salt from the coast. It was a warning to the animals, they say, and a greeting to the people on the road, and a promise to the crossing itself that someone was there to see it safely over.
The rule is simple. The keeper whistles for every train, and the train runs clear. If a keeper stops whistling, even once, even by accident, the crossing takes the next train through. It does not matter whether the gates are down, or the lights are red, or the driver has seen the warning. The train passes over the road with its brakes screaming and its driver sweating, and nobody on the crossing is hurt, but nobody on the road is spared either. The crossing takes what is owed.
Ellen Marr, who was keeper at Kessin during the war, told the story of a young man named Reg who came to the gates in 1943 and thought the tune was a joke. He said he would not whistle for a railway that had never once thanked him. He stood at the gate with his hands in his pockets and watched the goods train come round the curve, and he did not whistle. The gates stayed up. The train came through without slowing. It struck the cart of a farmer's wife crossing the line, and the woman was killed, and the horse, and the boy who was riding in the back.
Reg never whistled again. He left the crossing and went to work in the munitions factory at Calder, and he did not come back to Kessin for the rest of his life. Ellen says he used to say, when he was very old and very drunk, that he could still hear the tune at night, very faint, from the direction of the level crossing, and that it was asking him, every time, whether he would like to come back and make it right.
The keepers at Kessin now are a family called Boyd, who came from the coast in the sixties and learned the tune from the widow of the last Marr. The Boyds whistle it every time a train comes through, morning and night, in the wind and the rain and the dark. They say the line is quiet now, and the crossing has never taken a train since the war. But they keep whistling. Nobody on the Kessin road has ever asked them to stop, and nobody has ever wanted to find out what would happen if they did.