Meaning of ghost train | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A fairground attraction in which participants ride through a haunted house in a railcar.
2. 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. A rail service which does not appear in the public timetables.
   UK
4. A supernatural manifestation of a railway locomotive or passenger cars.
   UK
5. An unmanned train rolling on the train line.
6. A train service that no longer exists, having stopped running.

Equivalents

Examples

“'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!”

“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.”

CEFR level