Escape

Every journey has a beginning, and regrettably in Glasgow that usually involves an overpriced bus. Allowing for some traveller’s artistic license, I could happily remember a journey to the Isle of Skye beginning here, at the tranquil Helensburgh Upper railway station. Maybe twenty miles from Glasgow, Helensburgh has two stations, one with a regular service on the electric line into Glasgow and the other a modest single platform in a cutting on the northern fringe of the town. Having skirted along the shores of the Clyde for half an hour or so, the West Highland Line begins here. We have left behind the grey tower blocks, littered streets and urbanised horizons of the city, and suddenly find ourselves rattling through rolling rural landscapes.

I have taken this train many times before, although not since moving to Glasgow last year. This line is no longer a component of a much longer journey from England to the remote west coast of Scotland, but a practical escape hatch from the city to the countryside. A couple of times a day an unassuming train of railcars departs Queen Street station for Fort William and Mallaig, normally with a portion to Oban detaching en route. After winding up steep hills past suspicious looking military bases, the train approaches Loch Lomond and begins a sharper and more screeching series of curves. Above us, only mountain. Below us, only trees, glimpses of a road and water. At Ardlui we’re held up for a short while, waiting for a southbound train to leave the single track ahead.

Being so remote, the West Highland Line has no traditional railway signals to control access to its portions of single track. A team of doubtless charming British Rail boffins developed a system in the nineteen-eighties that could satisfactorily replace the traditional tokens. Until then (and to this day on other remote British railway lines) an actual physical token, normally a large coin or loop that could easily be scooped from a signalman by the driver of a passing train, must be held by a driver before he or she can lead a train onto a section of single track. With only one token, it’s a relatively failsafe system to ensure that only one train enters a section of track at any one time.

The solution of the dynamic and pre-portable computer nineteen-eighties is a radio-controlled system. The token is virtual, transmitted by radio to an ungainly metal box in the cab of the train. On clearing a section of single track (normally at a station with a passing loop) the driver releases the token for the previous section of track and then awaits reception of the new token.

Don’t ask me how it works, but it does. And it permits an archaic but astonishingly beautiful railway to continue to exist, with daily passenger service and popular summertime tourist trains winding through the mountains of the West Highlands, perfectly framing any escape from the city with a rolling landscape of beautiful scenery and wildlife.

Snapshot: Christmas Eve, Glasgow Central Station

Actually, I tell a lie. It was the evening of the 23rd when I took this photograph, the evening before I left Glasgow to travel home for Christmas. Holiday travel this winter has been mercifully painless; I hope everyone I saw rushing home made it as smoothly as I did.

The Idea of North

On journeys to the northernmost extremities of the countries I’ve lived in or visited, I have always travelled by train. In the early winter of 1997 or 1998 (I have very little documentary evidence to remind me) I pushed further north than I’ve ever been since, arriving in St. Petersburg (59º 56′N) on a stiflingly hot sleeper train from Moscow. Then in May 2006 I travelled north from Winnipeg in Manitoba to the remote town of Churchill on the frozen shore of the Hudson Bay (58º 74′N). The journey took about forty hours, snaking up through prairie farmland towards thick forests and remote native settlements, before striking the bleak tundra that rolled on for hours until we reached the end of the line. The pair of locomotives that hauled me there (in the thrice-weekly rake of refurbished fifties passenger carriages) are seen above, rumbling away during their twelve hour layover before the return journey south. The engines of these trains always idle when stationed in Churchill in case the sub-zero temperatures seize them up and they can’t be restarted. And they always pull the train in tandem, no matter how short or lightly loaded the train is, since breakdowns cannot easily be rescued.

On Saturday I pushed further north in the British Isles than I’ve ever managed before, and unsurprisingly enough I did it by train, riding on Britain’s most northerly railway.

It should be considered a national disgrace that British trains don’t have the same majesty, sophistication or drama of Russian or American locomotives. The Far North Line from Inverness to Thurso (58º 59′N) and Wick (58º 45′N) traverses some of Britain’s remotest and most beautiful landscapes, taking four and a half hours to cover some 280-odd miles. But it now does so under the almost exclusive service of frankly piddly little two-carriage Sprinter railcars, the noisy, rattly, overcrowded and cramped scourge of my old cross country commute between East Anglia and Sheffield.

But then again, the scenery more than makes up for the discomfort of the journey. This was perhaps the coldest weekend of the winter so far, with the BBC expecting inland temperatures in the Highlands to drop as low as -15ºC. On Saturday only a light frost had touched the remote moorland seen from the train (above); my relatively busy train from Glasgow to Inverness had earlier crossed the Drumochter Pass in thick snow.

But by Sunday afternoon and the return journey, a heavy snowfall had covered the northern Highlands. We rattled across unwelded track (that’s what makes the clickety-clack, don’t you know?) and I sank into the seat, recalling Glen Gould and endless wintry skies.

The circular strike

The Cathcart Circle railway line that snakes through our little corner of Govanhill and Queen’s Park is our handy link to the centre of Glasgow. It takes just six minutes and £1.35 to get from our stop into Central Station, which is both quicker and cheaper than the cynically expensive bus. The lines (and most every other one in Scotland) however, are much quieter today, as the RMT calls the first of two twenty-four hour strikes this week (from 12h00 midday today and 12h00 midday on Thursday). As with all labour disputes, there are of course two sides (link and link – thanks Monkey for the URLs) to every story.

Snapshot: Caution

Seen on board the ScotRail Caledonain Sleeper last week en route to London.