When the clock strikes 7 p.m., my fellow passenger’s earlier murder mystery remark pops back into mind. Two carriages, draped in heavy linen tablecloths and gently clattering with china, are set for dinner. Finding a seat means, quickly, eyeing your compatriots, and choosing who to dine beside. The musical chairs of claiming a seat dictates the direction of your entire meal—each encounter, a surprise in its own way. One night, we’re beside two women: one, a widow who’d long dreamed of riding this train with her late husband, the other, a friend who offered to accompany her on the dream trip after the loss. Another evening, it’s a couple from Massachusetts who rode a different itinerary on this train the year before, and have come back to see another route. “We keep saying: It’s a once-in-a-lifetime trip—twice!” I enjoy the company; I also remind myself to maintain eye contact when fluffy flocks of sheep appear in the windows behind the table spread.
After dinner, the train always comes to a halt for the night, and the bar car lights up with local musicians who step aboard, playing Scottish ballads and folk songs. The soft glow of the lamps spills onto the dark countryside around us; the warmth of scotch, always delivered with a nod to its age and ilk, even cozier. Scotland, in many ways, is brought to us, and quietly lingers even as we drift off to sleep.
It’s a crisp morning when we ride alongside Loch Carron, on Scotland’s northern coast, slate skies and still waters surrounding the rails. I need a thicker coat to ride on the observation deck, an open viewing platform at the nose of the train, but the air—still heavy with morning dew—is clean, sharp, and pure. Our visit to the coastal village of Plockton today is a chance to walk among colorful cottages, and spot seals and otters dipping in and out of the water. “We’ll end the excursion at the pub,” says our local host Ian Gardiner—a witty Scot, and British Army veteran. “We’ll always end at the pub.” Some of us have elected to take a boat tour through the loch, whereas others will go on a country walk or visit a botanical garden. But our pattern does affix itself: by the end, we’ll all reconvene over thick Guinnesses at the town’s watering hole, as we will do in most every town we visit.
It’s a unique challenge to try to “see” a country—what does it mean to properly do so? On this, my inaugural visit to Scotland, I always wish our whistle stops were longer, and yet I feel a yearning to maximize the time we spend riding the rails, watching the scenery like a movie. Four days to do just that feels hardly enough. By our final evening, I’ve settled into this pattern—dine, dabble in the texture of a new place, and return to the onboard comforts—but I’ve also found myself enamored by Scotland. The fact that we’ve seen more livestock than people. The fact that the views never stay quite the same. The way in which Scottish morsels and intangibles alike have managed to break their way through the train’s windowed barrier, from idioms and folk tales to cans of Tennent’s.
