‘Beautifully produced’ book o

One of the most compelling features of a feature-rich countryside is still the Mallaig Railway, an extension to the Glasgow to Fort William West Highland line.

Its construction began in January, 1897, and it was completed at the end of March 1901. No-one with connections to Lochaber and a knowledge of the districts takes it for granted, and no traveller who discovers it, forgets it. Building the Mallaig Railway is the human story of how this came to be.

As we travel the line, we sense the feats of engineering and we wonder at the labour involved. This beautifully produced book reveals all. It is derived by the author from the chancefind of a batch of negatives in an auction in Cornwall.

The finder, Michael Holden, instigated its research by contacting the Glenfinnan Station Museum with an old picture of a rough-and-ready wooden building with crinkly-tin roof and sign above the door proclaiming ‘Cooper and Co’s Railway Stores’.

Given that part of a similar sign is preserved in the

Cooper and Co Railway Stores, Lochailort.

museum, the search was on, though the photographer remained anonymous. About 150 of the high-quality images clearly showed scenes from the building of the Mallaig line; the ensuing ‘enjoyable treasure hunt’ and ‘journey with all its twists and turns’ have transformed this into a fascinating and intriguing book.

In spite of Victorian railway mania, why build a railway here at all? These were Na Garbh-Chrìochan – The Rough Bounds – and not the destination of those who followed in the footsteps of Johnson and Boswell.

But the extension was sanctioned by Act of Parliament to access West Coast fisheries and alleviate the dire situation of a population blighted by poverty and catastrophic economic collapse.

The contractors were the Glasgow-based firms of Simpson and Wilson, civil engineers, and Robert McAlpine and Sons, contractors, a combination which had worked together on the Glasgow Subway in 1892-1894.

They were ‘young’ firms with railway and tunnelling experience and a proven reputation for developing mass-concrete construction. This was a seemingly perfect symbiosis of skills for an extraordinary enterprise.