Under the glass and steel dome of Queen Street Station, one of Glasgow’s two railway stations, the song Shout to the Topby The Style Council, a jazzy pop group from the 1980s, played by an unknown piano player, resonates with class. This danceable piece is used in the film Billy Elliot (2000), by Stephen Daldry, continues the melody of our train journey on the West Highland Line, in the west of Scotland.
It’s simple, if the temptation of summits and back roads had not caught up with us, we could almost have been content to contemplate, from the windows of the three carriages of this train with its spectacular route, the cinematographic landscapes sculpted by water and time.
Opened in 1894, the 100-kilometre line originally ran from Craigendoran, north-west of Glasgow, to Fort William in the western Highlands. In 1901, to promote the fishing trade between Mallaig on the Atlantic coast and Glasgow, a new section was created. The route was then long, over seven hours (about five hours today), but travellers delighted in the endless moorland parade. At Crianlarich the line heads west to the port of Oban and its islands: it follows the Callander and Oban Railway, built between 1866 and 1880, less known than the West Highland Line.
We choose to go through everything, to see everything. To take our time to enjoy the softness of the lights and the raw beauty of nature. In the Highlands, water is omnipresent. To get lost in it even between the freshwater lochs, the estuaries, the bays, the ocean and the sea. It digs these glens, valleys embroidered with eroded mountains, pine forests and sparkling peat bogs.
From the very first day, after leaving Glasgow and its red-brick working-class houses, you dive into this enchanting world, your nose pressed to the train window. What more could you ask for than this comfortable carriage speeding to the rhythm of an adagio under a myriad of rainbows along the River Clyde and the pearly Loch Lomond?
“The theme of water and nature is recurrent in Scotland. We find it in the history of whisky, of trade, the estuaries were old highways, in the Art Nouveau architecture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh or in the landscapes of the painter John Knox. [1778-1845]which can be seen at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow,” explains French guide Aurélie Noël.
At Tarbet, our first stop, we find on Loch Lomond the softness of the lights expressed in the painting North Western View from Ben Lomond (c. 1834) of the aforementioned John Knox. It is here, in the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park, that many passengers disembark to join the West Highland Way, an eight-day hiking route from Milngavie, on the outskirts of Glasgow, to Fort William.
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