by Gilbert B Norman
One of the most scenic rail journeys I know; rode such during June 1979:
http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/tr ... steps.html
Brief passage:
http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/tr ... steps.html
Brief passage:
- After considering several possibilities, I settled on route No. 71, a train trip from Glasgow to the town of Fort William and the village of Mallaig along the West Highland Railway. Today, the route is greatly feted — a poll in Wanderlust Magazine, based in Britain, calls it the most scenic railway journey in the world. But in 1910, this route was in its infancy; the railway route was completed only nine years earlier.
The journey began before dawn at Glasgow’s Queen Street Station. There, under the Victorian latticework of the roof, a little train drew up in blue and red livery. As we slipped out of Glasgow, I cracked open my Baedeker to Page 555, “From Glasgow to Fort William to Mallaig,” as a reader might have done in a world when Britain still ruled India and automobiles were a novelty.
Baedeker offered a running list of the physical markers that zipped past the train’s broad windows: Dumbarton Castle, “strikingly situated on a precipitous rocky hill”; Craigendoran Pier, “an important starting point for steamers”; Helensburgh, “a favourite watering-place with extensive steamboat connections”; and Shandon, “with a large hydropathic establishment.”
