Saturday 23 October 2010

The Penistone to Mallaig Line

Some of you may remember the following two things 1) there is a railway line running across the back of our garden and 2) last October a steam engine pulled a train past the house. Given the gradient from Barnsley to Penistone it actually required two LMS Black Five locomotives to pull the train. Unfortunately all I saw was the smoke from engines 45231 (The Sherwood Forester) and 45407 (The Lancashire Fusilier).

The first half of our recent holiday in Scotland was based around seeing lots of bits of the highlands that we hadn't seen before, and, doing it in style.

The stylish way to see the countryside between Fort William and Mallaig has to be the Jacobite Express. We didn't get to look at the engine in Fort William because we were running a little late and wanted to get a good seat and so it was only when we got off in Mallaig that we found out we had been traveling behind The Sherwood Forester.

If you haven't been to Mallaig before then I'll just say that it seems a wonderful little fishing community that serves what has to be the best set of fish and chips I've eaten in a really long time.

We didn't take the train back to Fort William but were instead collected by a coach so that we could spend longer visiting some of the places we had seen from the train, specifically Glenfinnan with it's viaduct and monument to the 1745 Jacobite uprising.
26 October 2010 at 23:34 , Graham Edwards said...

I've never yet managed to make that train journey. It just never seems to get near enough to the top of the bucket list.

It's a few years since I was in Mallaig too.

Sounds like you had a good time.

27 October 2010 at 08:32 , Mark said...

It's well worth it if you have the time. The scenery is wonderful and nothing really beats traveling behind a steam engine!

9 November 2010 at 07:06 , Scriptor Senex said...

Sounds a great journey. I hope the windows were nice and clean. That's usually one of the advantages of lines like those (I'm assuming it's private) - the volunteers keep all the equipment in such perfectly clean condition.

9 November 2010 at 16:57 , Mark said...

It's actually a strange line. The Jacobite service is a private enterprise, but it runs on a normal BR line. There are normal scheduled services each day that you could catch to see the scenery instead.

The windows were quite clean, unfortunately it was a little wet and they steamed up quite a bit on the inside.

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