The Express Train to Hell is an American folktale about a ghostly train making regular visits to Newark, New Jersey’s Central Station throughout the 1870s. The train usually departed at midnight, carrying an old man who confesses to murdering another man who cheated him at cards. Other references to a “Black Diamond Express Train to Hell” came via African American, Methodist, and Baptist religious traditions of the Deep South, made their way into sermons and songs, and eventually were recorded on the gospel and blues race records that were prevalent in the early 1920s. Trains had a powerful impact on the lives of average Americans in the late 1800s and early 1920s, and the powerful metaphors of heaven- and hell-bound trains were widespread. In these tales, songs, and sermons, the train allegory exhorted individuals toward moral behavior, lest they board an express train bound for hell.
The most detailed version of the New Jersey tale tells of an old tramp that has been visiting Newark’s Central Station repeatedly over a number of days, accosting waiting passengers, announcing “It’s coming for me!” over and over. The narrator and his family are waiting for the 12:15 a.m. train when the tramp grabs the narrator and shouts once again, “It’s coming for me! The Express Train for Hell is coming for my soul!” The stationmaster and assistants intervene at that point, but as the narrator and the other passengers wait, at two minutes to midnight, the tramp repeats his pronouncement. A train’s whistle blows, leading the narrator to wonder if his own train is arriving early, but instead, an invisible train passes in front of them, and the tramp vanishes from the grip of the stationmaster and his assistants. All who witnessed the event are astonished. The stationmaster calms the passengers, the 12:15 a.m. train arrives on time, and the narrator and his family depart, vowing never again to return to Newark Central.
A variant of this tale refers to the Express Train to Hell as a ghostly train that regularly arrived at Newark’s Central Station on midnight on the tenth day of nearly every month during the 1870s. In this version, witnesses reported hearing the train whistle and the sound of the wheels on the track, but no passengers were ever seen vanishing or boarding the train.
Many references to the existence of New Jersey’s Express Train to Hell can be found on the Internet with little to no attribution or citation, furthering the notion that the tale has reached the status of an urban legend. On July 10, 2001, David Rountree, a sound engineer and member of the New Jersey Ghost Hunters Society, entered Newark’s Penn Station and made a midnight recording of sounds from Track One in the vicinity of Track Five (the site of the historic Central Station). He claims, similar to the above tale, that the passengers were mystified by the sound of an approaching steam locomotive unlike any train in the station. He posted two sound files of these midnight recordings to the New Jersey Ghost Hunters Society website.
Another version, the “Black Diamond Express Train to Hell,” is described as an African American folk-religious tale that ultimately made its way into fire and brimstone sermons and songs given by charismatic Baptist preachers, admonishing their congregations to live moral lives rather than those defined by sin and avarice. These song-tales are variously referred to as the “Black Diamond Express for Hell” or the “Black Diamond Express to Hell.” Reverend A. W. Nix became one of the best-known preacher-singers of the “Black Diamond Express to Hell” and was immortalized with six recorded versions for Chicago’s Vocalion Records between 1927 and 1930. He recorded another train sermon, “The White Flyer to Heaven,” in 1927.
Advertisements for the record read, “Here she comes! The ‘Black Diamond Express to Hell’ with Sin, the Engineer, holding the throttle wide open; Pleasure is the Headlight, and the Devil is the Conductor. You can feel the roaring of the Express and the moanin’ of the Drunkards, Liars, Gamblers and other folks who have got aboard. They are hell-bound and they don’t want to go. The train makes eleven stops but nobody can get off” (Cohen 1981, 603).
Contemporary composer Douglas J. Cuomo debuted his Black Diamond Express to Hell, a double concerto for cello and keyboardist controlling an electronically manipulated recording of Reverend Nix’s famed sermon, at the UK’s Spring Sounds Festival on May 27, 2011, furthering the cultural relevance of the tale of the Express Train to Hell.
Courtney G. Walsh
See also Baby Train; Scary Stories; Supernaturalism in Legends and Folklore; Urban Legends/Urban Belief Tales
Further Reading
Cohen, Norm. 1981. Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Dixon, Robert, and John Godrich. 1970. Recording the Blues. New York: Stein & Day.
Hauck, Dennis William. 1994. The National Directory of Haunted Places: A Guidebook to Ghostly Abodes, Sacred Sites, UFO Landings, and Other Supernatural Locations. Sacramento, CA: Athanor.
Morgan, David, and Sally M. Promey. 2001. The Visual Culture of American Religions. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Oliver, Paul. 1984. Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schlosser, S. E. 2006. Spooky New Jersey: Tales of Hauntings, Strange Happenings, and Other Local Lore. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot.