LET OFF A LITTLE STEAM
Soaring views, silver service — this is truly glorious Scottish rail travel, says Roderick Gilchrist
LONE PipeMajor Iain Grant, late of the Royal Scots, in kilt and feathered bonnet, plays Amazing Grace at Edinburgh’s Waverley Station as we board the claretandgold carriages of the Belmond Royal Scotsman train. He is performing just for us, as if we are all monarchs of the glen. As the pipes echo across the platforms, smiling staff hold out flutes of champagne. Not a bad way to begin a Highland adventure.
Ahead is four days’ revelling through glens of purple heather, around icy lochs, past brooding mountains, peaks ringed with lacy collars of snow, on the way through Scotland’s beautiful countryside and its historic castles.
The Royal Scotsman enables you to leave the 21st century for a gentler age. The train is not to be confused with the recently renovated Flying Scotsman, the old steam engine that, most of the time, is kept in the National Railway Museum in York, but set to make occasional forays around the country after repairs that have taken 11 years.
The Royal Scotsman, pulled by a diesel engine, operates exclusively in the Highlands, twice a week throughout the summer. It carries just 36 passengers in nine carriages refurbished fromom vintage Pullmans like an Edwardian gentlemen’s club. ub.
The sleepingg cars have mahogany gany panelling, wall candlelights and nd prints of clann chieftains to the e delight of the passengers, many of whom are American and can’t wait to get kitted out in rented d kilts and parade e like Bonnie ie Prince Charlie lie tribute acts.
One of them, Tom Russell, an Oklahomalahoma oil man, hireded his by phone from Tu ls auls a and is fitted out on arrival l ii nEdiE din burgh,bhw it hi th Hunting Stewart tartan, sporran, white ruff and sgian dhu for his sock. ‘Puts me in touch with my inner Braveheart,’ he laughs.
THE feeling of having left the real world is confirmed when a bulldog named Gary pads along the corridor — followed by his mistress, the Hollywood actress Carrie Fisher, who plays Princess Leia in Star Wars. She had instructed the chef, nononsense Glaswegian James Souter, that Gary will ‘only eat hamburgers and bacon with vanilla ice cream for dessert’.
‘Never been asked for anything l i ke t hat f or a dog before,’ whispers James.
The skirl of the pipes has hardly faded when we rumble over the Forth Bridge, then hug the coast to Aberdeen and ‘stable’ for the night on a quiet stretch of track, at which point the onboard whisky ambassador, Les Harrow, serves smoky malts. Our progress across the wild Caledonian Eden resumes next morning, rattling from Inverness and the Moray Firth, through the Torridon mountains to Kyle of Lochalsh, gateway to Skye, skirting the whitewashed fishing cottages of Plockton (which doubled as the Summer Isles in the horror film The Wicker Man).
The Belmond Royal Scotsman scores top marks for excursions. There are private tours by the ancestral owners of Cawdor Castle, Shakespeare’s inspiration for Macbeth, and Ballindalloch in the Cairngorms, where the outlaw and folk hero Rob Roy was welcomed.
Before dinner, two of which are black tie, we gather in the Observation Car — social centre of the train. It’s a stylish dining room at the end of which is an openview veranda, a bracing spot to feel the pinefresh air and cure hangovers as the train rattles on single tracks across desolate moors. Ah, the gr great outdoors. Rothi emurch us min the SpeySp Valley is as ru rugged as it gets gets. Commandos tra trained here for th the attack on th the Nazi’s a atomic heavy water plant in the Norwegian fj fjords, immort talised in the fi film The Heroes Of Telemark. ‘We still find bubul lets in the tree trees which they used for target practic practice,’ says ranger, Jamie. FeedingFe Bambilike deer b by hand is as physical as I ge get. That afternoon, The Royal Scotsman crosses the Tay, just an angler’s cast from Glamis Castle, childhood home of the Queen Mother, a gloomy old pile.
‘Aye, it’s because they are mean,’ says Mary the guide. ‘They won’t pay for bigger light bulbs because they burn too much electricity.’
There was a curious oil painting in the drawing room of the Third Earl of Strathmore in which, seated on a throne, he was stripped halfnaked, an ermine robe strategically positioned.
‘That’s a bit risqué for the 17th century, isn’t it?’ I ask Mary.
‘He’s trying to show us what a virile guy he is,’ she giggles.
The last night on board is always a special celebration. At midnight, an accordionist leads the gentlemen in kilts and tuxedos, lassies in glamorous frocks, on to a deserted Dundee station platform to dance the Gay Gordons.
My partner is Princess Leia. Gary, the ever present dog, tongue lolling, runs in and out of the revellers. Strictly had nothing on us.