Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Only the Dead Get Off at Kymlinge Part 1

While working on my piece about urban exploration for Geek
(due out Sept.) I interviewed the Multidysfunctional Monkey a Swedish urbex-er. He's got a sweet site here with photos of his exporations. I had a lot of fun talking with him. Here's an excerpt from our conversation with more to follow:

I asked about "urban legends" in the UE community. I was riffing on the whole C.H.U.D. thing.

Monkey:

"This story dates back to the days of the 1970s and the abandoned train station of Kymlinge (in Sweden). I say abandoned but it was actually never put to use. The station was put up as there were plans to build a lot of industrial buildings around it and someone figured it would be good to have another station. But for some reason the industries never happened and the station was never put to use. The trains never stopped at Kymlinge and I guess it became known as something of ghost-station in everyday conversation. But the thing that really got the talk going was the ghost-train (!).

At some point in the mid 1970s people started to report sightings of a strange train that only traveled around a night. It looked a bit like the regular trains but was the colour of silver. This train obviously became something of a ghost-train with time and was rumored to be the only train that ever stopped at Kymlinge. "Only the dead get of at Kymlinge station" was the word on the street. However, nowadays the story of the silver ghost-train has been explained time and time again.

The ghost-train was actually a set of 8 prototype train carts (a type that was called "C5"). There were only 8 of them produced as it turned out the train carts would be too costly to use. The train was known as "The Silver Arrow" and is now a ghost of the past."

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