Despite living in Scotland for nearly five years, I was unaware of the Far North Line; testament, perhaps, to its remoteness. By most standards, its southern terminal in Inverness is already the far north – three and a half hours by rail from my then home of Edinburgh; and as far as you can get from London without changing trains, requiring an overnight stint on the Caledonian Sleeper.
Yet Inverness is just the start of the line: from there the route meanders through 160 miles of the highlands – including a detour to the UK’s northernmost station, Thurso – before concluding in Wick. With a novelty flight booked from this small town’s even smaller airport, I took on the entire end-to-end rail journey.
There are just four daily services that run all the way, and I set out at sunrise on a crisp winter morning for the first of them, the 7am departure which would deliver me to Wick at 11:30. The train turned out to be a minimal affair, with just two carriages – don’t expect frills such as first class seating or a catering trolley, but there were toilets, a good supply of luggage racks, and at-seat USB power.
With 25 stations between Inverness and Wick (seven are by request only), the journey soon settles into a stop-start rhythm. The first, Beauly, sets the tone: after fifteen minutes running alongside a firth, we arrive at a platform so short only one door of the train can be opened. Sheep graze nearby, and in the distance there are white-capped mountains. Nobody boards. At the next station, Muir of Ord, someone does – a postman, who will alight just two stops along the line. We gain another passenger at Conon Bridge; this takes our carriage to four people, as busy as it ever gets!
Past Dingwall we join the Cromarty Firth, where a pair of oil rigs are undergoing maintenance at Invergordon. We follow the A9 past Fearn – seemingly more horses than people – and Tain, where the road can take advantage of the Dornoch Firth bridge but the railway has to take a 45 minute detour inland. This tracks a series of waterways: the firth to Ardgay, a relatively long stretch without a stop; the Kyle of Sutherland, which we cross; the River Shin to Lairg, where crew are exchanged with a southbound train; and the River Fleet, along which we travel south-east as far as the Loch of the same name. Our passage startles birds, sheep and rabbits; a farm dog races us through his fields; I glimpse a castle, highland cows, and what I think was a reindeer. Hillsides are strewn with boulders and heather.
At Golspie we rejoin the road, and meet open water: the Moray Firth. Wick lies just 50 miles along the coast, but the tracks only run for a third of that before diverting inland once more. The valley of the River Helmsdale is an attractive stretch, with tumbling waters and tumbledown farmhouses. We encounter a Scottish weather phenomenon – rain so localised it only falls on one side of the train, brilliant blue skies still seen on the other.
As we progress north the valley broadens, the hills soften then retreat, and the ground transitions through spongy to waterlogged. This is the flow country – Europe’s largest blanket bog, and a UNESCO world heritage site. The landscape takes on a reddish hue which proves near-perfect camouflage for deer – I spot a couple, but I expect there were far more.
Beyond the bog, Scotscalder is the last of the request stops, announced mere moments before we passed through. From there we make our first visit to Georgemas junction, where the line splits: north leads to Thurso, east to Wick. With only a few trains per day, each service calls at both, so we reverse out of the junction to call at Thurso, returning 25 minutes later. The final stretch turns out to be some of the roughest track, but there’s one last scenic highlight: Loch Watten, a linguistic cousin of last summer’s Lake Vattern.
We arrive into Wick slightly off schedule, at 11:36; but honestly, the time has flown by, my book and phone almost entirely neglected. My only regret is that the scenery rolling past proved almost impossible to capture by camera, a combination of low Scottish sun and internal lighting creating glare or reflections in every shot. I hope, therefore, that my words above have done the journey some justice – it was definitely a highlight of my trip!