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ghost train

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

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English

Noun

ghost train (plural ghost trains)

  1. A fairground attraction in which participants ride through a haunted house in a railcar.
  2. (theater) A ghost-themed excursion offered by many tourist railways around the world. Usually, a fictional story is created and performed with static displays or live actors on either side of a train. Actors and actresses play out a story on the long and narrow stage provided by the railcar aisles.
  3. (UK) A rail service which does not appear in the public timetables.
    • 2025 October 29, Vitali Vitaliev, “Haunted by the past”, in RAIL, number 1047, page 68:
      'My London' website writes about an interesting phenomenon of 'London's ghost trains': "The legal procedures to close a railway line in the UK are so complex that it is cheaper to run a token 'ghost train' down the line once per day, week or month. These trains often run empty because they don't always appear on maps and timetables, hence the nickname 'ghost trains'." What a waste!
  4. (UK) A supernatural manifestation of a railway locomotive or passenger cars.
  5. An unmanned train rolling on the train line.
  6. A train service that no longer exists, having stopped running.
    • 2024 September 4, Vitali Vitaliev, “A salute to Ukraine's 'Second Army'”, in RAIL, number 1017, page 47:
      As a second-year student at Kharkiv University, I took a summer job as a conductor of the train that ran from Novorossiysk on the Russian Black Sea coast to Kaliningrad in the Baltics - a 48-hour journey via Kharkiv, from where the train originated. In modern geographical terms, it went across four independent states: Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Lithuania. As such, it has now joined the long list of 'ghost trains', extinguished by the ongoing war.

Synonyms

(unmanned train):

Hypernyms

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