WELCOME to Haunted Wirral, a feature series written by world famous psychic researcher, Tom Slemen for the Globe.

One rainy November night in 1968, George the Plumber was in the George and Dragon on Birkenhead’s Grange Road when the topic turned to the supernatural.

Someone mentioned a 'ghost train' that had been heard rumbling along under the streets of Oxton at four in the morning.

Dozens had heard it, and the pub know-all laughed and said there were no railway tunnels under Oxton, but Ted and Mary, a middle-aged couple, chipped into the conversation.

They lived on Singleton Avenue and they’d both heard the subterranean rumblings all hours in the morning.

"I’ve heard it," said an old Irishman in the corner of the pub, "it's rats on the move – ever since they started putting that flyover up on Conway Street!" 

"Trains get everywhere. There’s a locomotive buried under Wembley Stadium," remarked the landlord, ‘under the centre spot, it is.

It fell down a pit when McAlpine’s were building the place in the early 1920s and they had to leave it there.

One of workmen on the job used to sup in here and he said the train was named “Stublick”.’

The long arm of coincidence then reached out for George the Plumber when his wife Doris burst into the pub waving a piece of paper at him.

"George, a man’s just phoned and said there’s a job you were supposed to do on Singleton Avenue – I wrote down the directions here."

"I haven’t even put this pint to my lips yet!" 

George protested but Doris pulled him from the bar before the bemused clientele.

"We need the money George, now get in that bleedin’ van!" she replied, and soon a grumbling George was sitting in his grass-green Commer van.

He had no recollection of being booked for this job at all.

Doris marched home as he started to decipher her terrible handwriting.

He drove to the job just over a mile away.

It was at some strange-looking building he’d never really noticed before, situated at the junction of Woodchurch Road, Singleton Avenue and Temple Road.

He walked round the curved U-shaped building and saw three green doors – all shut.

He then saw a fourth door in an alleyway off Woodchurch Road, and this door opened, and a tall stern-looking red-haired man came out, looked George up and down, and nodded to the toolbox he was carrying.

"You were supposed to be here half an hour ago!" he said, in a well-spoken voice.

George went into the building and descended down three flights of steps.

The man said something about “TPWS”, moderators, regulators and a reactor.

"Oh," was all George said in reply, and then he found himself walking out onto the platform of some unknown train station – and there was something which looked like a steam train, only it was painted green and had what resembled a machine gun turret on its smokebox.

"It’s just come from the Royal Ordnance at Chorley," the tall man was saying, when the wide-eyed driver of the odd-looking locomotive looked out the window of the train and shouted: "That’s not Wilkinson!"

The tall red-headed man turned to look at George with an expression of utter surprise, and he asked: "Who are you?" And he pulled out a revolver from his inside coat pocket.

George felt faint.

"I’m George – George Talbot, my missus sent me; she said I was wanted here!"

"Didn’t you ask him for any ID?" the driver shouted from his window, and the red-haired man shook his head and replied, "I assumed he was the engineer!"

"I’m the engineer!" A man came onto the platform in a blue boiler suit, carrying a large red tool box.

"Get shut of this chap," he said, nodding to George, "it’s just an innocent mix-up!" 

George was escorted back up to street level at gunpoint.

He was warned that if he ever spoke about what he’d seen, he’d be done away with by the Secret Service, but George promised he wouldn’t breathe a word.

He was shoved out of the electricity substation facade and the door was locked behind him.

He told the police, his wife, everyone in the George and Dragon, but no one believed him.

Many years later, many of Wirral’s nuclear bunkers were declassified, but some believe that the so-called ghost trains occasionally heard under the streets of Wirral are in fact special steam locomotives that could be powered by coal or nuclear fuel.

These trains are part of the alleged Strategic Reserve – a secret transport system designed to withstand a nuclear war.

Diesel trains use delicate electronic components that would not withstand the zap of an Electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) generated by a nuclear explosion – but primitive steam trains would not succumb to EMP, and for years, a rumour has persisted that a secret fleet of long-decommissioned locomotives has been requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence for use in the aftermath of a nuclear war.

Over the forthcoming weeks Tom will tell you more tales of the mysterious and the uncanny in the Globe.

Haunted Liverpool 28 is another dazzling collection of supernatural fact by Tom Slemen, arguably England’s greatest writer on the paranormal