Far North Line
In the first part of a special two-part focus on Scotland’s Far North Line, ANDREW MOURANT travels from Inverness to Thurso, with storm Ophelia threatening his journey through remote hamlets
In the first of a two-part special focus, RAIL travels on Scotland’s Far North Line from Inverness to Thurso.
The easyJet aircraft had twice circled the runway at Bristol Airport before finally daring to land in a stiffening cross wind. After a swift turnaround, it wobbled unnervingly on take-off for Inverness. It was the first stage of RAIL’s journey to Thurso - planned on a balmy day in early October, but undertaken amid the remnants of hurricane Ophelia.
The omens weren’t good. This could become a tale of missed connections, or even of a knockout blow for the Far North Line’s sole afternoon service. Ophelia (what remained of her) was due to rip through Caithness by early evening. What might that mean for a line notoriously susceptible to late running?
This was a last chance day - the final one when a cheap return flight from Bristol linked to a train that should, in theory, make it most of the way to Thurso before nightfall. There would be no more easyJet bargain days before the end of summer time drew a black blind over northern Scotland by mid-afternoon.
Yet, as luck would have it, Ophelia didn’t blow the timetable off-course. The 1400 from Inverness was a runner - nearly full, with most seats reserved. There were passengers of all ages, many with small suitcases - the baggage of short-break holidaymakers.
On time, but no catering trolley service. That’s all too often the way, according to those who monitor the Far North Line’s daily performance. Inverness station offers a meagre choice of food and drink, so travellers should arrive prepared. Otherwise, anyone venturing to Wick faces almost four and a half hours without sustenance.
The train is a two-coach refurbished Class 158. Its plus points: a luggage rack midcarriage, and WiFi that works. Comfortable enough, although too little leg-room if you sit at a table. My travelling companions sitting opposite are a partially sighted young woman
Inverness station offers a meagre choice of food and drink, so travellers should arrive prepared. Otherwise, anyone venturing to Wick faces almost four and a half hours without sustenance.
and her affectionate black Labrador guide dog, already with a four-hour rail journey from Edinburgh under their belt. It makes for a bit of a squeeze.
First stop is Beauly. The original station building is a foursquare stone house with Dutch-style stepped gables, served - like so many with short platforms on this route - by a single exit, the rear door of the front coach. Not just short - at 49.4 feet Beauly’s platform is the UK’s shortest.
Pulling away, something unnerving starts to unfold. Daylight begins draining away as though early afternoon is making a freakish headlong dash for darkness. Half past two has suddenly come to resemble half past six. The view to the south east is of a satanic blackness more profound than at the sun’s total eclipse.
The sky looks doom-laden, threatening a downpour that might wash away anything in its path. (A trick, it later transpires, of Ophelia’s weather system, which had sucked in Saharan dust and smoke from forest fires sweeping across central Portugal.)
At Conon Bridge, reopened in 2013 after 53 years closure, street lamps are already on, and lights glow from living rooms.
At Invergordon, two stops beyond Dingwall (the point at which the line to Kyle of Lochalsh peels off west), the sense of daynight is heightened as oil-rigs anchored in the Cromarty Firth, animated by studs and splashes of light, creep spookily into view. Over the water, the landscape of Black Isle is barely visible.
The Far North Line (FNL) is renowned for magical scenery, but rarely can it have looked like this before mid-afternoon. As the time inches towards 1500, something of the blackness lifts, but not completely, although we are spared the torrential rain that had looked inevitable.
The line is dotted with comforting domestic station buildings, as well as small functional modern shelters. At Tain, it swings north west following the southern flank of Dornoch Firth, and runs exhilaratingly close to a shoreline of rocks, seaweed, mud and sand - delights that make any joyrider wonder ‘why would anyone actually want this line to run more quickly?’ (In this leisurely spirit, the loop of pre-recorded stop announcements is lagging one station behind!)
Yet pragmatists do. People worry about the economics of FNL’s survival and the
At Tain, it swings north west following the southern flank of Dornoch Firth, and runs exhilaratingly close to a shoreline of rocks, seaweed, mud and sand - delights that make any joyrider wonder ‘why would anyone actually want this line to run more quickly?’
opportunities that swifter trains might offer local people.
Dornoch Firth marks the start of an extravagant detour inland. The loop inland from Tain via Ardgay to Lairg has never followed the A9 - instead, it was intended to open Sutherland’s remote heartland. But it’s long been argued that this leg (and the stations it serves) could be cut out, that a 900-metre bridge across the water could lop 26 miles and 45 minutes off the journey time.
RAIL picked up this debate back in 2013. A Dornoch link would make the Far North less remote, its promoters say. It might encourage more people to do business there; more tourists to enjoy the scenery.
There is also the social inclusion question, of bolstering and improving accessibility to so remote an area. A bridge might open up a new rail commuter option to Inverness for residents of Dornoch town and neighbouring villages. Commuter services from Tain - barely three miles south as the crow flies - could compete with the A9 trunk road, campaigners add. But for the foreseeable future, the line will continue to wander its dogleg way. As distant hills loom into view from the north, by Ardgay (at the head of Dornoch Firth) the murk thins a little more. Here the line creeps further north and inland, and two stations lie very close together - Culrain and then (across the viaduct spanning Kyle of Sutherland) Invershin. It is 1550 - we are roughly halfway.
A sense of remoteness begins to exert its grip. The occasional small village, a farm, fields - and then the landscape drifts into rugged moorland and sparse vegetation.
At Lairg, its station a mile and a half out of town, the line then dips south east to Rogart, a halt that closed in 1960 only to reopen a year later, but at which this train doesn’t stop.
At Golspie, it rejoins the coast to begin one of its most mesmerising stretches - 50049 Defiance at Wick on October 7 2007, with an Inverness-Thurso railtour. Running 161 miles from Inverness, the line to Britain’s most northerly town was not completed until 1874.
hugging miles of rocky coast and golden sand, waves breaking distantly, through stations at Dunrobin Castle and Brora (whose eponymous river rushes through tree-lined banks to the sea), and Helmsdale (the gateway to Caithness).
Here, once more, the route swings away inland, northwest. It relinquishes the A9, whose route it had tracked for 15 miles or so, and heads up broad river valleys - Strath Ullie and Strath of Kildonnan. It follows the fast-flowing River Helmsdale, a constant companion to the journey’s latter stages.
The existence of stations such as Kildonan, reported to be the line’s least used, seems ever more improbable as we reach the threshold of Britain’s great wilderness, Flow Country, the largest expanse of blanket bog in Europe covering 4,000 square kilometres.
A phenomenon dating from the end of the last Ice Age, the bog developed due to damp, acid conditions that encouraged the growth of sphagnum moss. When rotted, this forms peat. Unsuitable for farming, the area has been largely spared human development. But in the 1980s, some areas were planted with non-native conifers which, along with artificial drainage, dried out the peat and contributed to its erosion. Many of those trees have been felled, and attempts made to restore the bog.
Flow Country makes for an eerie sight in the thickening twilight. Water everywhere - streams, small splashes of loch, untamed. Civilisation absent. There is a road through here, too - the A897 cuts up from Helmsdale towards the north coast - but there’s no traffic on it. Forsinard station, another outpost in the middle of nowhere, seems entirely to cater for bird watchers visiting its RSPB centre.
Now the line veers firmly north east. There’s no stopping at Altnabreac - miles from any road and served only by a long rough track, and used almost exclusively as a request stop by walkers.
On we go, without pausing at Scotscalder, to Georgemas Junction, almost at journey’s end. Here the train used to divide, with one part heading to Thurso and the other to Wick. No longer - Wick passengers must sit tight as the train goes into reverse and out of its way, serving Thurso first.
Against the odds we arrive on time, at 1850, in Britain’s most northerly town. With the holiday season in retreat, there have been few comings and goings after Inverness, and those disembarking were greeted by a parting shot from the dwindling hurricane. It’s 10° colder than in Bristol, with fine rain driven by a stiff wind. Thurso appears to have hunkered down for the evening.
Yet it proves to be a hospitable place, at least if RAIL’s experience is any yardstick. In Thurso and Wick, B&B owners are used to working around the train, and seem unfazed by its vagaries. If the 1820 from Inverness (the last of the day) is delayed, they find themselves meeting and greeting travellers at hours most people would shun.
My billet is Bed and Breakfast at 4 - comfortable, and run hospitably and with good humour by Claire and Richard Spargo. They pick me up, get up before 0600 next day to cook a hearty fry-up, and then run me back to the station. The Spargos are a fount of information about things I never get to see, plans to explore Thurso’s harbour by night having been scuppered by the incessant rain. I leave as I arrive, in darkness, but grateful that the weather has relented and that the 0650 back to Inverness is only four minutes late from Wick.
The station building is shut, as it had been on arrival. So are the toilets which, according to the notice on wall, would open at 0954. On the dot, every day? Why so precise?
Ten passengers join this early train, which has a bleary-eyed feel about it. One is a man from Scrabster, the departure point for ferries to the Orkneys. He is heading all the way to Dover (his job is laying trench cables), and he is also flying from Inverness. He could have travelled by bus or hire car, but prefers the rail journey. He uses the train for pleasure, and
A sense of remoteness begins to exert its grip. The occasional small village, a farm, fields - and then the landscape drifts into rugged moorland and sparse vegetation.