There are many contenders for my favourite train journey in the UK, including Paddington to Penzance (especially down by the sea in Devon and crossing Isambard Brunel's bridge into Cornwall), Belfast to Derry in Northern Ireland (I love the meandering route to the north coast), and King's Cross to Edinburgh (with those fine views across the Tyne at Newcastle and on the turn into Berwick-upon-Tweed) – but the Kyle Line is my number-one ride.
You can pick up excellent little guides explaining what you see along the way from the WHSmith, which is just across the concourse from Bertie's Bar. Before going to the platform, I poke my head inside Bertie's, to find a solitary customer munching a sandwich with a dram of whisky on the side. He does not look up as I enter; the sandwich has his full attention. I can see no barman. An 'Alice's Wonderland' fruit machine flashes wildly. Time seems to have frozen in the 1980s or 1970s, or maybe earlier still. For a moment I just stand and look about. The only movement comes from the slow, steady chewing of the sandwich-eater. He has yet to touch his dram. He has yet to take his eyes off his food. It is a very strange setting. I give up on a drink of my own (still no barman) and leave him to it.
The train to the Kyle of Lochalsh is pretty peculiar, too, in a pleasant way. A handful of passengers joins the carriages, and I find a lilac seat with a jaunty pattern.
A conductor checks my ticket. 'OK, bud,' he says, before moving on to an elderly couple who have mislaid their tickets. 'Don't worry. You don't look like our usual fare dodgers,' he says. He disappears into the next carriage.
A whistle blows and the ScotRail train soon crosses a teacoloured stream into undulating countryside, the land quickly turning gold and purple, khaki and mauve. Gorse and bracken cling to slopes by fields with chestnut horses. Piebald mountains tower above valleys. Lochs spread out before us, gloriously still and mirror-like. It's a sunny afternoon. Shards of light reflect off the water into the carriages of the train.
This is a blissful place.
We cut through pine-clad hills on a detour made necessary by a troublesome nineteenth-century laird who did not want tracks on his land. Here, on the steepest section, there was almost a disaster in 1897. A locomotive lost power at the top of the ascent and hurtled backwards down the line. It is hard to imagine how terrifying the experience must have been. Luckily, no one died.
We twist onwards beside a perfect loch. Gentle ripples and tiny eddies disturb the surface: salmon in the depths, perhaps. Grasslands open up with sheep huddled round feeding posts. Black cattle swish tails. A bird of prey swoops above a ravine. Then an estuary widens into view, with folds of fog in silvery grey above the choppy turquoise water.
This is one ride you never want to end. But beyond little stations named Dingwall, Garve, Stromeferry, Duncraig and Plockton, we pull into Kyle of Lochalsh, where we are greeted by a British Transport Police sign that says: BEWARE GADGET GRABBERS' TACTICS. Apparently there are three types of thieves on the loose: 'grabbers, snatchers and pluckers'. Each has their own devious way of relieving passengers of their smartphones and devices. It seems impossible that such characters could be lurking in such a gorgeous setting.
I catch a taxi past a tropical tree of some description (can it be a palm tree?) near the harbour master's office – somewhat unexpected so far north, though my eyes don't seem to be deceiving me. The female cab driver has a rail-enthusiast story. 'I had an elderly gent in here last summer. With his nephew, he was,' she begins. 'Picked him up and he was jumping about on the back seat like a little kid. I thought he'd just been made a grandad. I asked him what was up. He said, "We stopped by the Glenfinnan viaduct and took a photo." He told me this was otherwise known as the Harry Potter viaduct. I thought, That's nice. He was bouncing about as though he had ants in his pants – in his eighties, he was. There's a lot of them like that: trainspotters. I was quite happy that he was so excited.'
We cross a bridge onto the Isle of Skye, and draw up at my hotel. Then the driver surprises me. 'To be honest, trains are not my thing,' she says as we pull into the driveway. 'Not for me, really.'
And I give her a second look. It's the first time on these travels, I realise, that I've come across anyone who has said that. After criss-crossing the globe so many times, I seem finally to have found one: someone who doesn't like trains.
The Mallaig Railway runs from Mallaig to Fort William over precisely 41.75 miles. I know this as I bought a publication entitled The Mallaig Railway from Sheila at the WHSmith in Inverness. Around 25 miles from Mallaig, you arrive at the Glenfinnan viaduct of Harry Potter fame. This viaduct is 1,248 feet in length and 100 feet high, with 21 spans of 50 feet. It is constructed of concrete made of 'cement and crushed rock quarried from the cuttings through which the line passes at each end of the viaduct'. The viaduct opened in 1901, helping free up 'fish traffic' on the West Highland Line. Thank you, The Mallaig Railway booklet.
And it's a pretty big deal in train circles.
In the morning I catch a ferry from Skye to Mallaig and just make my train to Glasgow, which takes in the famous viaduct before plunging southwards to Fort William and beyond. The Skye–Mallaig ferry had been delayed, resulting in a dash across a car park and along the platform. A guard had watched my ungainly sprint, though when I said, 'Oh, thank you so much, just made it!' he had totally ignored me and blown a whistle.
So much for the 'hey, bud' of the last train.
But never mind: we're soon moving into golden hills, stopping briefly at Arisaig, the most westerly station in Britain, then weaving and rattling along the coast. Bright light rises from the sea on the edge of the North Atlantic Ocean as we pick up speed. Lochs, waterfalls and abandoned crofts soon lead to Glenfinnan, whereupon everyone peers out to glimpse the marvellous croquethoop arches. During the summer, the Jacobite steam train makes trips between Fort William and Mallaig – and this is the reason why.
It's not just a viaduct; it's a curving viaduct, twisting round so much you can see the train's loco and carriages ahead. I'm travelling in the off season. The journey on the ScotRail trains I am taking from Inverness to the Kyle of Lochalsh and then onwards from Mallaig to Glasgow cost the princely sum of £29. This is for a distance of 220 miles, which works out at 13p a mile. An adult return on the Jacobite itself is just £34. Trains can be pricey at times when compared to the cost of flights, but they can also be tremendously good value (and people often forget that).
From Harry Potter's viaduct, you can see Prince Charlie's Monument. This stone tower down by the seafront commemorates the raising of Bonnie Prince Charlie's flag at this location in August 1745 during the Jacobite Revolt. When this revolution did not quite work out – the prince's forces reached as far south as Derby, before retreating and being defeated by government troops at Culloden – Bonnie Prince Charlie (Prince Charles Edward Stuart) returned to these shores and fled, just eight months after arriving. So ended the Jacobite rebellion that gave its name to the steam train that now chugs past with coaches full of rail-enthusiast tourists.
From Glenfinnan we roll onwards to Fort William, where an announcement is made that the train is 'no smoking, including the use of electronic cigarettes'. I have a doze and wake at Rannoch, where fishermen get on and hikers get off. A passenger cries, 'Mavis, calm down!' near Ardlui. I look up and see that she is talking to her dog. At Garelochhead, more signs warn of the dangers of gadget grabbers. A sewage plant emerges near Dumbarton. On the outskirts of Dalmuir, I buy a can of Tennent's lager from the trolley and take in a council estate that looks like a prison. A warehouse with a corrugated roof lurks behind a spiked, metal fence. Litter-strewn banks line the tracks. A dozen or more magpies rest in a tree in Westerton, where a trainspotter takes snaps of our carriages. There's an Aldi supermarket. There's another estate, then another and another: tall, characterless blocks that remind me of housing in cities in remotest Siberia. It's all a far cry from the beauty of the Highlands and the quiet of the lochs on the line from Inverness.
We enter a tunnel and emerge with a squeal of
wheels into Glasgow Queen Street station. My 13p-a-mile journey across Scotland is complete.
'I always take a note of a number'
Tenterden to Bodiam, and back, on the Kent and East Sussex Railway, England
Plenty of train books wallow in the golden era of steam trains, looking back with starry eyes at the glory days when the Royal Scot, Golden Arrow and the like hurtled along. There are many excellent and enjoyable volumes that cover the nostalgia of steam, with all the old advertising posters, the shiny locos, and the class system of the carriages. To get an even greater nostalgia fix, you can also go to see the preserved locomotives at many wonderfully maintained train museums (my favourite is the excellent National Railway Museum in York, while the London Transport Museum is a joy). Then there are Britain's many 'heritage lines' with working steam locomotives, plus services running on main lines such as the Jacobite and the recently restored Flying Scotsman. So far, however, I have avoided such rides as so many others have been there before me. What more could I possibly add that has not already been written?
Instead, I've tried to capture the here and now of trains, what they are like to travel on today – the grouchy guards, the gadget grabbing signs, the grim estates after mountains and lochs, to give a few Scottish examples – rather than put on a pair of rose-tinted glasses. Yes, describe some of the world's most beautiful routes, but try to tell it how it really is.
This said, I do want to take one lovely old steam train.
The Kent and East Sussex Railway opened in 1900, linking parts of the two counties that were isolated by the main-line railways. The line covers 10.5 miles between Tenterden in Kent and Bodiam in East Sussex. Its brief heyday lasted until the end of the First World War, when competition from bus companies and road hauliers who had bought surplus military vehicles put a squeeze on profits. So began a decline that led to its closure to regular passenger trains in 1954, although a few special trains were put on afterwards for hop pickers. Yet while that could have been that, rail enthusiasts stepped in. The line was saved and 20 years later it was reopened. Now the Kent and East Sussex Railway pitches itself as 'England's finest rural light railway'.
So, from the north of Scotland, I come to the south of England and the Holman F. Stephens, a bottle-green locomotive dating from 1952 and named after the line's original engineer and manager. It's a sunny day in Tenterden, Kent. I take a look at the loco in the station. A grey-haired man, with a flat cap and coal-blackened blue overalls, is attending to the train's furnace with a younger man in matching overalls. They seem pretty busy.
Instead of asking about their work, I go to the carriages and find a seat in a 1982 buffet car. There's a hiss and a rumble. The whistle blows and we chug into a countryside of fields lined with tumbledown hedgerows teeming with brambles and cow parsley. The wooden carriage has creaky red seats. Plumes of smoky steam pass the windows. Brakes squeal. I order a cup of tea from Debbie. Then I sit back and think about things for a bit.
Until now I've dared not tot up how far I've gone on all these trains around the globe. I know it's a very long way and has taken a very long time, but I have been saving the final sums. I have, I discover on counting, covered 22,304 miles over a total of just more than 21 days of journeys. To put this distance in perspective, the circumference of the Earth is 24,901 miles – just a couple of thousand miles more. This is an almost ridiculously long way to go on trains. Looking at it using another comparison, 22,304 miles is the equivalent of six journeys between London and New York or about four trips between London and Cape Town.
It's mind-boggling, really.
Then there's the time spent taking trains. While the total of 21 days sounds enough in its own right, when you take 505 hours and divide it by the average length of a working day (say, eight hours), this turns out to be 63 working days. Divide these by a five-day working week, and the mathematics show that I've spent the equivalent of about a dozen 'office weeks' on trains.
This does not, of course, include all the travel time to and from the destinations, delays, waiting at platforms, missing trains and so on. So, one way or another, I have spent quite a bit of time in and around stations.
I had not expected this when I set off to Crewe to meet my companions for the day at the end of platform five. But this is what can happen when you begin to take an interest in trains – they can begin, as I'm sure many a model-train lover knows, to eat up quite a lot of time.
I have been a very long way, and I have also seen how trains so often represent more than 'transport', just about everywhere I've gone: Crewe (which would not exist as it does now without trains); Kosovo (where the services to Serbia are still cut); China (with the sensitivity surrounding the line to Tibet); India (where Gandhi saw trains as imperialistic); Sri Lanka (with its reopened link to the Tamil north); Iran (where train tourism is part of opening up to the West); Russia (with its historical link between Nicholas II's extravagant railway-spending and the 1917 revolution); Australia (where the transcontinental line helped bring the huge nation together); America (where the Vanderbilts and the Hills contributed to catapulting the country into becoming the world's powerhouse); Bordeaux (hoping for a twenty-first-century railway revival). Across the globe, railways have acted as a key to unlocking stories about a place, not just as a means to see the scenery and sample the food in the buffet car.
So where do I stand on it all after taking the plunge into the world of trains?
I'll be straight up here and say: I love it. And this is not just because of the tales you pick up along the way.
Without intending to sound pretentiously 'deep and meaningful' or, indeed, depressing – and I apologise in advance here in case what I'm about to say drifts in both those directions – the planet is, as we all know, awash with problems, from global warming and fundamentalism to refugees, overcrowding, inequality, terrorism, wars, sabre-rattling, famines, floods, earthquakes, deadly epidemics, worldwide computer viruses, human-rights abuses, dictatorships and the mistreatment of women in many cultures. Stick this lovely lot in a pot with rising living costs and the growing pervasiveness of the internet, making switching off from work more difficult than ever, and what do you have? Rather a large amount of stress and worry.
With trains, you do not have stress and worry (when all is going smoothly, that is).
My motivation for writing Ticket to Ride grew out of wanting to understand the gentle pursuit of train interest. At one end of the spectrum: who are those people at the end of the platform with their cameras and notebooks? When I was at Crewe and during my time in Kosovo and Macedonia, I began to get an insight into this unusual-but-intriguing world. At the other end of the spectrum: why are so many people glued to their televisions watching programmes by the Michael Portillos, the Chris Tarrants and the Michael Palins? Even Joanna Lumley and film crew recently headed off on the Trans-Siberian, while prime-time shows about Indian trains seem to have an almost insatiable audience.
As well as this interest in 'rail enthusiasm' – spotting the trainspotters, if you like – there is also the simple question of why, in this age of fast, comfortable and cheap aeroplane travel, trains are doing so well just about everywhere. Travel companies, including Great Rail Journeys, Railbookers, www.Voyages-SNCF.com and Planet Rail, are packing in passengers very nicely indeed by all accounts; and that's just in the UK and Europe. Meanwhile, the spread of high-speed tracks across Europe and countries such as China and India shows that planes are not the be-all and end-all of long-distance travel that they might once have seemed.
Why do railways seem to have such staying power? What is it about trains?
On the Kent and East Sussex Railway, I get a few final clues to the answer.
In the buffet car, the passengers on the 10:40 to Bodiam know what they like about trains and they want to tell me.
'It's the smoke, the trundle, the countryside – and today we've got the sunshine,' says Geoff, in his sixties, from Bradford. He's sitting near me and wearing prescription ti
nted glasses, grey trousers and a blue jacket.
'I'm not heavy into trains,' he says as we pass rolling fields with sheep. Geoff has a notebook for 'train jottings' on his table and a camera round his neck. 'Oh no, I'm not so heavy,' he says. 'I do like the motion, though. The countryside, the movement.'
His friend Alan, also in his sixties from Bradford, is in almost identical clothing. He seems to be more heavy into trains, and other forms of transport, than Geoff. 'Steam trains and vintage buses – those are my things,' he says in a business-like tone.
He pauses and the train's whistle blows. We are somewhere near Northiam station. Startled wood pigeons flap out of solitary oaks. Wispy willows stand sentry by picturesque little streams. 'It's the whole job lot really,' Alan says, looking out at the willows. 'This line represents a reflection of another time.'
Alan pauses once again to check that I'm getting his message, which I am: he likes old trains a lot. 'I'm not being rude,' he says, 'but many newspapers give the impression that there is something strange about trainspotters – about taking numbers. But if you have the interest as a child – well, it stays with you. I always take a note of a number.'
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