WHEN the Christmas TV schedules appear, the first thing I look for is to see whether The Signalman is being re-broadcast.

This year, as for the last several, I have been disappointed. But there was a period, in the Eighties, when the BBC TV version of this classic Charles Dickens ghost story became almost a staple of the TV Christmas fare.

Usually broadcast on Christmas Eve, it featured a wonderful performance by Denholm Elliot as the eponymous signalman, deeply troubled and perplexed by a spectral figure that appears at the mouth of a tunnel below his cabin, waving wildly as if to warn of danger.

He explains to the story’s narrator, visiting him in his cabin, why he fears to tell his superiors, or even pass a warning along the line: “‘If I telegraph ‘danger’, I can give no reason for it. They would think I was mad.

This is the way it would work – Message: ‘Danger! Take care!’ Answer: ‘What danger?

Where?’ Message: ‘Don’t know. But for God’s sake take care!’ They would displace me.’”

What happens is well worth reading – and indeed often re-reading, to marvel at Dickens’ skill, and continue to wrestle with the mystery. Less well known (obviously) than A Christmas Carol, it is nevertheless one of Dickens’ Christmas stories.

Or, to be strictly accurate, it is a selfcontained tale in a collection of railwayorientated stories, published in 1866 under the title Mugby Junction, in a magazine Dickens edited.

His choice of a railway theme was strange, since only 18 months earlier he had been involved in a serious railway accident. Ten people died when a large part of the train in which he was travelling plunged into a river near Staplehurst, in Kent.

Dickens spent three hours aiding the injured, whose wounds he bathed with water that he brought from the river in his top hat.

The accident put Dickens off all travel, especially by train. His death, from a stroke, came on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the crash.

But in his writings Dickens, born in the era of stage coaches, which figure prominently in his early novels, notably The Pickwick Papers, fully grasped the new world of the railways. He was probably the first person to remark in print on the individuality of locomotives.

In 1850 he wrote: “It is perfectly well known to experienced practical engineers that if a dozen different locomotive engines were made, at the same time, of the same power, for the same purpose, of like materials, in the same factory, each of those locomotive engines would come out with its own peculiar whims and ways. . .”

The Mugby Junction collection opens with a masterly description of this centrepiece of the four stories in the early hours: “Mysterious goods trains gliding on like vast weird funerals. . . red hot embers showering the ground. . . iron-barred cages full of cattle.

. . shrieks and groans and grinds invading the ear. . . an earthquake, accompanied by thunder and lightening, going up express to London. Now, all quiet, all rusty, wind and rain in possession, lamps extinguished. . .”

There’s an edition of Mugby Junction published by Hesperus Classics (£6.99). Since TV can’t oblige, obtain a copy for Christmas – and get hooked on the hapless, tragic, signalman.