On the Slow Train (18 page)

Now the light is fading, though as we pull out of Preston there might just be a chance to get a glimpse of the floodlit ethereal spire of St Walburge's church designed by Joseph Hansom, of Hansom cab fame, the third highest in Britain, after Norwich and Salisbury cathedrals. It is of just as much interest to railway enthusiasts as architectural historians, since the spire is made from sleepers recovered from the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway. Talk of sleepers inspires thoughts of bed, and it is getting late now. There are few greater pleasures than being rocked to sleep by the gentle motion of a train and slumber should be guaranteed. Unlike the first sleeping cars, introduced by the North British Railway in 1873, passengers are not required to bring their own
bed
linen. Though they should prepare for the jolt at Edinburgh in the middle of the night as a Class 67 diesel is marshalled onto the front of the train for the rest of the journey to Fort William.

At 5.50 next morning the sun is already up and Abdul is knocking on my door with my breakfast tray in his hand to whet an appetite for the start of what was voted in 2009 ‘the world's most scenic railway journey'. We are trundling through Westerton in the northern suburbs of Glasgow and the Clyde, to the left, is a far cry from the busy waterway depicted in the 1936 film
Night Mail
, where the grainy smoky river was packed with shipping as far as the eye could see. There are no ‘steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes' nor ‘furnaces set on dark plains' as W H Auden put it in his famous film script. In fact, the riverbank is so bucolic this June morning that one could almost imagine you could cast a spinner for a trout without a single boat's wash getting in the way. But maybe it is a little early to get carried away by such innocent thoughts, since security fencing and barbed wire is coming into view along Gare Loch, a sign that we are approaching the huge Faslane naval base, home of the Trident submarine and Britain's nuclear deterrent.

Garelochhead station, at the beginning of Loch Long, is the start of the West Highland adventure proper, with its Swiss-chalet-style architecture and island platform the hallmarks of the line (so precise were the original engineers that some of the building materials were imported directly from Switzerland). One moment we are in the Lowlands and the next in the Highlands, as the train climbs steeply along the side of the loch. It's easy to imagine how the passengers marvelled in the brand new claret-coloured carriages on the first official train from Glasgow on Saturday 11 August 1894. As John Thomas puts it in his book
The West Highland Railway
, ‘The visitors were gathering to celebrate an event unique in British railway history. That day there was to be opened ceremonially a main line through one hundred miles of mountain and moorland, with not a branch line nor scarcely a village
worthy
of the name in all its length.' ‘It throws open to the public,' said the
Railway Gazette
at the time, ‘wide and interesting tracts of country which have been almost as much unknown to the ordinary tourist as Central Africa was ten years ago.'

Even in the twenty-first century, awakening in a sleeper bed fresh up from London somehow makes the scenery seem oddly exotic as we head along Loch Long, past Loch Lomond, squeezing through Glen Falloch, past Crianlarich, junction for the Oban line, with its famous refreshment rooms, once so celebrated for their luncheon baskets that twenty miles on either side of the line used to be littered with champagne corks and the discarded shells of plovers' eggs. Then on through Strathfillan to Tyndrum and the lonely little station of Bridge of Orchy. Now we're on the long climb to the bleak 400 square miles of the Moor of Rannoch, the bleakest place in the British Isles. Here are stags in profusion, with towering antlers, staring curiously at the train on the treeless moors. The lifespan of most of them is destined to be short, since on 1 August the shooting season will open. Whatever your view on such a sensitive subject, it was the stags and the influence of the powerful owners of the estates along the lineside that probably saved the train when it was threatened with withdrawal shortly after privatisation, and provided the Deerstalker Express with its nickname. On to the highest point of the line at Corrour, 1,350 feet above sea level, then a swift descent down Loch Treigside and through the gorges of the Spean to Fort William at sea level on the banks of Loch Linnhe, in the shadow of Ben Nevis. As John Thomas writes, ‘Never before in Britain had such a spectacular length of line been opened in one day. Never before had opening day guests been taken on so spectacular and exciting a trip. Here was a railway fascinating beyond words, every foot of it with a place in the past, a story in every mile.'

It is for the sake of one of these stories that I am not – unlike almost all my fellow passengers – continuing to the terminus at Fort William this morning. Instead, I am alighting at Rannoch,
officially
the loneliest station in Britain. Crunching on the gravel of the platform with my suitcase, I feel like Spencer Tracey in
Bad Day at Black Rock
, the only passenger to alight and seemingly the only living being on an uninhabited planet apart from a few hungry-looking peewits pecking at puddles in the gravel. For a moment there's a tightness at the back of the throat as I see nothing but a vast expanse of treeless boggy moorland and read a notice outside the station that proclaims, ‘At 1,000 feet, Rannoch Moor provides one of the wildest and most forbidding landscapes in Britain – treacherous mires, boulder-strewn moorland, complete lack of shelter and exposure to wind and rain make this an inhospitable environment. Walkers are warned this is not an area to trifle with.'

It is beginning to rain, and suddenly I notice there's no signal on my phone. And there is no sign of the hotel I booked, a building once used to shield the construction workers on the line from the elements. Did I really book this place, or was I imagining it? When I do find the Moor of Rannoch Hotel there is an ominous notice on the door: ‘Liz has broken her ankle and we are closed to non-residents.' But there is an enormous welcome from Liz Conway and her husband Rob, both Scousers who fell in love with the place on a holiday, restored it, gave up their jobs and are now in their seventh season running the hotel. ‘Look on the map,' Liz tells me. ‘It's as remote as can be. The nearest shops and garage are forty miles away. But the railway makes it not remote at all. And we never feel lonely. The train is everything to us. Do you know we get people, come up from Euston on the sleeper on Friday night and go back on the Sunday? It's a special little bit of solitude. But if the railway was ever threatened again, I don't know what we'd do.'

On a bleak winter's day back in 1889 a party of mostly middle-aged directors and contractors for the line got more solitude than they bargained for when they set out to cross the moor outside the hotel to scout out a possible route. They had clearly not read their Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote in
Kidnapped
of Rannoch,

The mist rose and died away and showed us that country lying as waste as the sea; only the moorfowl and peewits crying over it and far to the east a herd of deer moving like dots. Much of it was red with heather; much of the rest broken up with bogs and hags and peaty pools; some had been burned black in a heath fire and in another place there was quite a forest of dead firs, standing like skeletons. A wearier-looking desert man never saw.

The sight of this preposterous group of Victorians stumbling around on the moor in their tweeds and umbrellas would have been comic if it hadn't nearly ended in tragedy after the men got lost in the sleet and darkness. They floundered, utterly disoriented in the desolate stormswept waste until rescued by shepherds many hours later.

By the time Liz Conway had cooked me a (second) vast breakfast, the moor looked sweet and friendly in the summer sunshine. I have come armed with Dr George Hendry's
Book of Midges
, whose wisdom is as essential as any guidebook in this part of the insect-filled Highlands, and head out onto the moor along the banks of Loch Laggan. Curiously it does not feel spongy at all, although there are many patches of water looking like black treacle spilled on the grass. Everywhere there are roots of old Caledonian Scots pine, like ancient bones pickled in the peat, from the forest that once stood here. But danger is never far away. Thomas Telford gave up the idea of building a road here when it appeared the bog would swallow up every piece of foundation you put in it. It nearly defeated the rail builders too. Every last bit of spoil from constructing the line tunnels was poured into the moor and still the bog gulped down everything until the builders had the idea of floating a layer of brushwood – much as Robert Stephenson had done with Chat Moss on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Even today some passengers swear they notice an extra bounce in the track as it passes across the moor.

Remote though it is, the main part of the West Highland line was not threatened by Beeching. There have never been more than five passenger trains on a normal day, but its future was safeguarded by an aluminium plant at Lochaber near Fort William, fed by cheap hydroelectricity and generating a steady freight flow, rare for a line built primarily for passengers. Not so for the beautiful extension running for forty-two miles from Fort William to Mallaig, which Beeching settled on with his beady eye until it was ultimately saved in 1995, helped by the unlikely enterprise of a north of England farmer called David Smith. Each year during the summer months Smith and his West Coast Railway Company run an invariably packed steam train daily up the line and back. It would have been especially ironic if the line had shut, since when it was built in the 1890s it was the first in Britain to get a public subsidy, now the lifeblood of almost every secondary railway in Britain. At the time MPs were concerned about the plight of the crofters and fishermen in the remote west of Scotland, which with reports of starvation and worse was the Third World of its day. Money was voted to build a line to get fish down from the coast to the markets in Glasgow and thus to stave off disaster. But where exactly should the line run? Someone stuck their finger on a map, found a speck with a bit of a harbour and so the railway builders created the nation's biggest herring port at Mallaig.

Arriving on the early train from Rannoch into the relative civilisation of Fort William after a day walking on Rannoch Moor seems a bit like how it must have felt for an immigrant from the west of Ireland to contemplate Manhattan for the first time. No time to pause in the fleshpots (even if there were any in this dour West Highland capital) because the 10.20 Jacobite train to Mallaig is already in the platform, with K1 Class locomotive No. 62005
Lord of the Isles
already blowing off steam, its polished black livery making it look like a blackberry. The lithe K1 2-6-0s owe their pedigree to a design specially drawn up for the West Highland Line by Sir Nigel Gresley, and
Lord of the Isles
only escaped the
scrapyard
by hiding away as a stationary boiler in an ICI works in north-east England after being withdrawn from service by British Railways.

I'm travelling up to Mallaig with the loco's custodians, Gary, Ian, ‘Malcy' and Neil, members of the North Eastern Locomotive Preservation Group, who love this piece of machinery so passionately that they have used up their annual holiday to ensure that no one neglects her maintenance. ‘She's like a woman,' Malcy explains. ‘She's beautiful, but she's quite capable of being temperamental and moody.' Each man will take a turn in the punishing work of firing over the predominantly 1 in 40 gradients, and they have their own reserved compartment in the train. On the door is a notice which reads: ‘No admittance. Wear ear protection. Snoring in progress.'

There are fewer better descriptions of travel on the line than that of the humorist Miles Kington, who wrote in his book
Steaming through Britain
,

What you have to bear in mind when setting off from Fort William to Mallaig is that you're going from sea level to sea level. The trip to Mallaig is like going across the back of a glove – you go a long way up and a long way down but every now and then you glimpse a long snake of water snaking down to the sea. It is this coexistence of wild mountain scenery and the invisible nearness of the sea which gives the Mallaig line its special flavour, which you don't get on the line up from Glasgow or even the Settle and Carlisle.

Driver Alec McDonald, who has been at the regulator since steam days on British Railways (you don't have to retire from driving steam trains as long as you are fit, and the oldest steam drivers are invariably the best, it is said), eases the loaded train past Ben Nevis and over the swing bridge across Thomas Telford's great Caledonian Canal at Banavie. Here is the radio control centre which directs all the trains from Mallaig to Glasgow. Once drivers had to swap a large leather token a bit like a horse's halter
with
the signalman every few miles. On the West Highland lines these tokens are now metaphorical, delivered over a radio telephone to the driver, and we stop at Glenfinnan for a virtual interchange with a train going south. Here at the head of Loch Shiel is a poignant memorial to Bonnie Prince Charlie, recalling the 1745 rebellion, which ended in tragedy at Culloden. There is a little museum on the station with a few artefacts from the old days on the line, and John Barnes, the shrine's curator, a serious, bearded Englishman, who has been one of the line's best friends over the past two decades, tells me that the figure on the top is not the Bonnie Prince himself, as many think, but an anonymous Highland chieftain sculpted by a friend of Walter Scott. Running across the valley is the mighty Glenfinnan Viaduct, 416 yards long with 21 curving arches set 100 feet above the ground – one of the world's most stunning engineering achievements and built entirely of concrete, though few would guess, so well does it blend in with its setting. Its builder Sir Robert McAlpine earned the nickname ‘Concrete Bob' and until recently a diesel locomotive named after him ran on the line.