There is a very specific parenting skill nobody warns you about: staying completely calm while a man dressed as a skeleton leans into a train carriage six inches from your child's face. You will need it this weekend, because the Halloween Ghost Train is back at the Swindon and Cricklade Railway, running from Blunsdon Station on Tadpole Lane on Friday 30 and Saturday 31 October, 5pm to 9pm, no booking required.
Tickets are bought on the day, £12 for adults, £11 for seniors, £10 for children, and get you live actors in full ghost, witch and skeleton make-up, plus the Whistle Stop Cafe for anyone who needs a restorative cup of tea afterwards. Friday's trains are pulled by the railway's diesel locomotive, Saturday's by steam engine Lady Lisa, which feels like an unusually generous amount of choice for an event that is, fundamentally, about being gently menaced in a carriage.
Organisers have sensibly flagged that the scares are proper scares and recommend parental guidance for younger children, which is the kind of wording that translates, in practice, to 'bring a spare set of dry trousers.' In theory, a ghost train sounds brilliant: costumes, atmosphere, a genuine steam locomotive doing the heavy lifting. In reality it is one toddler deciding, three carriages in, that the witch is not a bit.
Meanwhile the dads. There will be at least one father per carriage performing the universal 'I am not remotely bothered' face while gripping a four year old slightly too tightly, a man who will later describe the evening as 'great, really good fun' in a voice half an octave higher than usual.
Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, said in her day a ghost train was a man behind a curtain with a torch and a sheet, and frightened absolutely nobody who had already met the landlord at the Plough. 'Ron went once,' she said, 'and complained the skeleton wasn't local.'
Services may be altered or cancelled at short notice, which, given the subject matter, feels appropriately on brand.