Alex's Bloody-Minded Highland Expedition - Part 3. DAY 1

The fated day has arrived! It's time for my Bloody Minded Rush to the North. Armed with only a laptop, a change of clothes and a fractured ankle I'll head for "Mallaig" - a small fishing port on the northern coast of Scotland. An overnight stay in Inverness, 6am start the next day, a two hour coach ride then a further two hours on the Hogwarts Express to dip my toes in the freezing northern sea.

On the spur of the moment I opt to plagiarize the format of the Guardian's blow-by-blow cricket coverage. Ten hours later I will be glad of this.




11:30: Arrive at King's Cross after a sleepless night to discover serious delays; track pizza at Knebworth. Ask the East Coast desk "Can I upgrade to first with this ticket?" - they reply "Yes".

11:40: Train is announced. Platform six. I'd secretly hoped for the newly invented Platform Zero for its weirdness and sentimental value[1]. I find an unreserved seat in first class. It'll cost £25 but hey, given free tea & coffee for eight hours, tons of space and a big window it's worth the expense. A wee Scots girl who can only be described as a young Amy Pond is deposited in the seat opposite by her grandfather. I keep my eyes peeled for Daleks, cracks in time and dizzy Shoreditch timelords.

12:00: Screw the delays, we leave on time. I call the B&B to make sure everything's in order. The well-spoken Scottish gentleman tells me it is.

12:06: Diversion en-route to Peterborough announced due to Knebworthian under a train. They say it'll add a 15 minute delay. It sounds too good to be true. Fortunately the 12:00 to Inverness is too venerable a train to require electricity and so a 20mph trundle around Hertfordshire will circumnavigate the mess. I pity the poor souls who attempted to visit the Edinburgh Festival via more modern transport.

12:40: It's sunny outside and the train is still moving. That's the best I can say about it. Young Amy Pond seems engrossed with her walk-in laptop (it's bigger than she is) - I hope she's writing an East Coast travelogue all of her own.

12:50: We regain the main line. Full steam ahead! A pleasant guard finally appears and boots out all the freeloaders sitting in first class with standard class tickets. I pay my £25.

13:55: The wifi is, as usual, shit. It's been shit ever since East Coast's predecessor made it free - a limited amount of connectivity with several hundred twits all trying to watch iPlayer was never going to work. Scarce resources only work with a nominal free imposed - charging £1 for a password would instantly solve the problem. But I didn't come here to dick around with the Internet, did I. DID I.

14:00: Lincolnshire passes uneventfully, much as it did for the first 18 years of my life. The sun is out. Few things in life are better than racing across the English Landscape on a summer afternoon.

14:40: York. 40 minutes late. If we arrive at Inverness an hour late can I have a refund on my refund? No food remains in the buffet car and passengers are showing early signs of cannibalistic rage. I hide my emergency mars bar.

14:41: I Spy Tornado! [2] She's parked outside York railway station having a drink. Being similarly unencumbered by the requirement for electricity a steam engine is pretty much the only thing to arrive on time today.

15:09: We shudder to a halt somewhere south of Darlington. A shaky-sounding guard squarks "This is a safety announcement: please *do not* stick your heads out of the windows, especially on the right-hand side because this is where the signals are". Oops. Did somebody leave their head behind? Wasn't me.

15:15: We're on the move again so the errant head must have been located. But "problems with the lineside signalling" mean the driver must stop at signals, get out and telephone control for permission to proceed. Somewhere back in York a steam engine is laughing at us.

15:38: The train roars over Durham. In a past life I dated a girl from here. She was horrible. Probably I was horrible too. I eat my Emergency Mars Bar and snarl at the one twunt in this carriage shameless enough to be using an iPad.

15:54: Newcastle. At this point I have to stop imagining I'm Michael Caine in the opening credits to "Get Carter". We're 55 minutes late. Our guard hazards a guess we'll arrive in Inverness at 21:10. Our "person under a train" at Knebworth is now officially a fatality. That's one less fish in the gene pool.

16:45: I can see the sea! The tide's in and Berwick upon Tweed is pretty as a postcard. I want to visit it someday. Judging by how transfixed she is with the view young Amy Pond seems to agree. A poster at the station proclaims "The best of colliery bands - out now!" and if the wifi wasn't so broken I'd buy it to listen to right now. From here the train skirts the clifftops for some miles and the views are stunning.

16:50: Scotland! I hide my Pret a Manger Pomegranate water for fear of a kicking. Everything here is gorgeous, even the nuclear power station. I always listen to All About Eve's "best of" album on this part of the journey; as a result I'll always connect the goth-hippy song "What kind of fool?" with the power of the mighty atom.

17:30: Edinburgh; 1 hour late. Amy Pond disembarks with her own bodyweight in luggage and an angry parent on the phone. Kids, don't carry mobiles - your parents will only use them to tell you off.

17:40: Still Edinburgh. "We are sorry for the further delay; this is due to a defective door on the driver's power car". I put on the Cocteau Twins' calming "Heaven or Las Vegas".

17:45: Depart Edinburgh 72 minutes late. Seriously, can I get a refund on a refund ticket? And hmph, I thought we were going to cross for Forth Bridge. It emerges that the "problem with the power car door" was that at a previous stop someone had put luggage in there, the staff locked it and then lost the key. They had to crowbar it open.

18:10: Pottering around Scotland at 20mph - apparently we are stuck behind a local train since nobody expected the express to turn up an hour and a quarter late. I'm strangely not furious - at least it's a sunny evening and everybody's being pleasant about it.

18:30: Stirling - 1h15 late. As we leave I notice something adorable: even in the year 2010 civilized people still teach their children to wave at trains. The landscape grows increasingly hilly; it's still sunny out there with the occasional low-lying cloud. What a beautiful evening. I hope I there's a pub near the B&B.

19:07: Perth. 1h09 late. At least the staff have found some more food and are keeping us well fed. Cannibalism outbreak aboard the 12:00 has been averted. At least one passenger is started massaging her legs for fear of deep-vein thrombosis. Staff are handing out refund forms, which is nice of them.

19:51: I finish catching up on a fortnight's worth of New Scientist. Glance out of the window and spy... geese! Weather is getting cold and ominous-looking. Perhaps I should have brought more than a thin jacket. Perhaps I'll die up here.

20:04: Mountains. Loads of the buggers. And dark, brooding clouds. Scotland is so dramatic.

20:19: The guard (did I mention he's lovely?) turns up, stamps my free compensatory return ticket and opines that I'm probably due a free compensatory compensatory return. I joke "see you again next month then". If it really happens I'll eat my hat.

20:36: The train continues to trundle around little Highland branch lines. Think single-track, clinging to mountainsides, that sort of thing. A team of mountain ponies would find this hard going. Why did we bring an Intercity 125? Only a handful of passengers remain, mostly looking scared and confused. It's getting cold and dark. I thought at these latitudes it was supposed to stay light all night?

21:11: Arrive at Inverness. Hobble to taxi rank. Cab to B&B.

21:30: ...who've never heard of me! In fact the well-spoken Scotsman who took my booking has been replaced by a brusque Eastern European lady with poor English. I press them and point out, repeatedly, that I've had the room booked for a month and even telephoned nine hours ago to check. The cross Eastern European is forced to sort it out. Emerges that the well-spoken Scotsman is Somewhere Else and merely handles the bookings, texting them (along with credit card details!?) to her to action. And the first day of my booking was lost. Nice. I make them give me the one remaining room for the price of a single and am tempted to report them to VISA.

21:45: Basement room is, uh... well it has a bed in it and cost £35. It'll have to do. It lacks phone coverage, daylight or a working TV and would suit even the most demanding of masochists. At least the place has wifi.

SLEEP NOW.



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Day 1 conclusions: it is quicker to fly to New York from my house than it is to get the train to Inverness. East Coast trains seem very accident prone but at least the staff were nice. B&B's are atrocious. Always travel with an Emergency Mars Bar.

Day 1 statistics: Suicides: 1, Signal failures: 1, Keys to the engine lost: 1, Atrocious B&B's: 1.





[1] I once spent six months on a project to build a high-performance web architecture known as "Platform Zero". It was not a success.

[2] For the uninitiated: Tornado is a steam engine constructed by epic nerds in their shed. My dad built one of the lamp brackets. Having made their own locomotive from scratch they now drive it around Britain's railways for shits 'n giggles. No train journey is complete without a game of "I Spy Tornado" - it's a bit like "Where's Wally" only the protagonist eats coal and needs a 5,000 gallon drink from the Fire Brigade every couple of hours.