How do you make the sounds of a train (and what’s the sandpaper for?)

You can’t stage The Ghost Train without the titular train, and 100 years ago they had no choice but to make effects live on stage. For our 100th anniversary we did the same: but just how did we make an impressively realistic train with seemingly random objects, such as a coal bunker, fire extinguisher and sandpaper?

A good idea at the time…

“Wouldn’t it be great if we do all the effects live”, someone blithely suggested in our first discussion of The Ghost Train a few years ago. Well, it seemed, to some of us, like a good idea at the time. After all, the script comes complete with a full ‘score’ for the train: the original effects plot, complete with list of materials, and the way in which twelve people operate them.

“Hmm: I don’t see why we wouldn’t take advantage of modern technology and use recordings” commented one ‘Doubting Thomas’. But where would be the fun in that? For our 100th birthday, live effects it was to be!

Where do we find that?

When we actually tried to work out how to bring the train to life, it quickly became clear that it was not quite so simple. For starters, some of the items we required were now hard to get (a large galvanised water tank), potentially dangerous (compressed air cylinders), so obscure that we couldn’t work them out (an ‘amplifier’ for steam?), oddly specific (an E-flat tubular bell) or with no obvious use (‘motors, electric or mechanical’ never made any sense). We also realised that we couldn’t fit twelve people behind the scenes!

So, in the best am-dram tradition, we took the spirit of the score and did our best to find our own way to do things. We stumbled upon this excellent scan of a book that was almost contemporary to the play, and even mentions its effects: “Stage effects and how to work them” .

And here’s how we did it.

Roll on the train

As in the original score, the rumble of the train across the stage and the clattering of wheels over a joint in the rails was made with a garden roller, rolled across the stage behind the set and then back and forth over slats set on the stage to give a rumble and kerdunk-kerdunk sound that physically vibrated the hall.

The galvanised tank was swapped for an old galvanised coal bunker, and banged and rattled alongside two drums to give the rumble and bangs of the moving train and impression of the puffing engine.

Lacking the genuine GWR artefact, the train whistle was three cheap toy whistles (but not so-called train toy whistles, which sound too American) joined together to give volume, ‘blown’ by compressed air stored in an empty fire extinguisher pressurised with a tyre pump, with a fourth whistle mouth-blown to give the quieter ‘distant’ whistle.

The sound of hissing and puffing steam was created by not by using compressed air, but by rubbing two sheets of sandpaper together: a smooth circular motion for hissing steam, short rubs for puffing. Of all the effects, that’s perhaps the least likely and the one that really surprised us.

As in the original ‘score’, we used old milk churns to provide the sound of train doors clanging shut.

Will it work?

We tried the effects for the first time with a certain degree of trepidation: would it work, or had we scrounged all the materials for nothing? Would Doubting Thomas be proved right?

Oh. My. Heavens.

None of us could believe how effective it sounded. Even ‘Doubting Thomas’ had to admit that it really might work.

And with a lot more practice, and a very clever cue system devised by Tim McGill, we really did manage to create the illusion of the trains in much the way that they would have done 100 years ago.

Give peas a chance

We created the rest of the effects live too: dried chickpeas bouncing down a zig-zag tube made the rain; and we made a traditional machine according to one of the 1928 sketches to provide the sound of wind outside the station.

We allowed ourselves two concessions to modernity: whereas the 1944 SBADS production of The Ghost Train used a giant tailor’s iron heated on a Primus stove and doused in water to generate steam, we used a (rather safer) modern fog machine; and the lights of the train passing the windows were produced not with arc lamps and slides but using digital data projectors playing out a remarkably complex video (created by Tim) that had to take account of the very odd angles involved behind the stage.

A roaring success

We’re really pleased with the way that the effects played out, and if you came to see the show we hope that you agree that it was worth the effort to create astonishing effects in a low-tech way.

We’d like to thank the people who lent us the materials to do it, including Totnes Band for the loan of percussion instruments via Paul Pennicotte-Henrie, and the North Huish Community group for lending us the milk churns.

We’d particularly like to thank all the team operating the equipment behind the scenes: ‘AJ’ Kempthorne, Tim McGill, Val Meek, Jess Munday, Alan Prince, Greg Wall, Cathie Pannell and Julia Willoughby: true wizards back stage.