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 jazz pop group from the 80s, performed by an unknown on the piano, resonates with class. This dance song included in the film. Billy Elliot (2000), by Stephen Daldry, extends the melody of our train journey on the West Highland Line, in the west of Scotland.
It’s simple: if we hadn’t been tempted by the peaks and secondary roads, we would have been almost content to contemplate, from the windows of the three carriages of this spectacular train, the cinematic landscapes sculpted by water and time.
Opened in 1894, the approximately 100-kilometre line originally linked Craigendoran, north-west of Glasgow, to Fort William in the western Highlands. In 1901, to encourage the fishing trade between Mallaig on the Atlantic coast and Glasgow, a new section was created. The journey was then The route lasted more than seven hours (about five hours today), but travellers were delighted by the parade of endless moors. At Crianlarich the line heads west to the port of Oban and its islands: it follows the section of the Callander and Oban Railway, built between 1866 and 1880, less known than the West Highland Line.
We choose to go through it all, to see it all. To take our time to enjoy the softness of the lights and the raw beauty of nature. In the Highlands, water is omnipresent. To lose yourself even among the freshwater lakes, estuaries, bays, ocean and sea, dig these glens, valleys embroidered with eroded mountains, pine forests and sparkling peat bogs.
From the first day, after leaving Glasgow and its red brick workers’ houses, we immerse ourselves in this charming world, with our noses glued to the train window. What more could you ask for than this comfortable carriage that runs 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, trade, estuaries that were once roads, in the Art Nouveau architecture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh or even 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.
In Tarbet, our first stop, we find the softness of the lights expressed in the painting on Loch Lomond. North West View from Ben Lomond (c. 1834) by said John Knox. It is here, in the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park, that many passengers alight to join the West Highland Way, an eight-day walking route from Milngavie, a suburb of Glasgow, to Fort William.
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