Ghost Trains

The Baptist assembly started in London in the afternoon on Friday and this gave me the chance to travel on one of Britain's Ghost Trains.  There are only a few of us sad enough to know they exist and even fewer that ever get to travel on them - but then they are not really designed for travelling on.

The train mentioned in the linked article above is the return journey of the train I travelled on from Gerrards Cross into London Paddington.  To the uninitiated that sounds a normal enough pair of stations but in fact every other train from Gerrards Cross goes into London Marylebone.

After dutifully waiting  for more important other trains (and every other train is more important) the 10:44 sets off in the same manner as dozens of others toward London (except it has hardly any passengers).  At Ruislip it waits for ages for some more of the more important other trains before setting off onto what can only be described as a siding.  Trundling down a single track at a speed familiar to all London road users (but not train travellers) it passes selections of burgeoning weeds, crumbling viaducts, electricity substations, old trackbeds and the back of Central Line surface Underground stations with waiting passengers visibly wondering how that train gets over on that bit by the hedges.  It passes the back of factories.  At times it is joined by important-looking freight lines.  It wends its lonely way through parts of West London that forever blow the theory that London is a city crowded with buildings - there are literally acres of wasteland and this train traverses them all.

It never stops.  (This is simply because nothing else uses the line it is on.)  It also never really starts because the line is not kept in any order that allows any speed.  It feels like it is going further and further into nowhere.

Then.

Then one more green light and it passes the gleaming Heathrow Express train depot.  It kind of springs into life at more than 20 mph and soon is in the back end of bustling Paddington Station.

And off I climb and join the hoardes of people pouring in from Wales, the West Country and from via Heathrow all over the world -  people everywhere from everywhere going everywhere.  Have I really just arrived from one of the most irrelevant pieces of transport infrastructure in London?

If assembly is anything - whether on a Sunday or Churches meeting together - it is a little like that journey.  We feel quite alone.  We look at the wastelands.  We feel we are travelling nowhere with nobody.  And then - and then we are part of the people of God.

What a day it will be when from the world over the people of God gather from their journeys through the wastelands of poverty and persecution and pain.  Ghost Trains are strange things - as anything must be that takes you to Paddington Station and leaves you standing there thinking of the Throne of Jesus and his glory!