Ghost Stories - Train

When I was younger my friends and I liked to tell each other ghost stories. One, specifically, I don't remember the particulars of, sticks in my mind. There's supposed to be ghost trains that travel, lonesome, through the night at times and places where they shouldn't be. They ride forgotten tracks across the country and blow through deserted stations, sounding their whistle like a warning or a plea.
 In my bed, in New Jersey, with my sister sleeping nearby, the train whistle across the street was a natural part of the world and it didn't frighten me.
But in a tent up in the mountains that same keening sound was remote and so much less familiar. Where were the tracks that held that train and where was it going? Who were its passengers?

 I imagined a great, tall man driving that train, grin like a skull, pushing on through forever and his cargo in the cars, hands and faces to the windows hollow-eyed, watching the speeding landscape, mouths open like pits. What are they thinking? Are they thinking? Or are they past that now and left only with an instinctive wanting. A wanting for home, a wanting for an end to their journey, a wanting for whatever happens to be on the other side of that glass. And they continue to race by the overgrown stations of rust and rot, staring out into eternity and taking this slap dash race to nowhere like a punishment. But what do I know, I've never seen any.