The Stations That Won't Let You Drive Away

The rain at Inverness was fine enough to be invisible until it found your collar. On the departure board, the Kyle line blinked and then held steady. A woman two rows over was trying to fold a paper map that had already given up.

Someone had searched, recently, for Scotland rail stations without car access. It is a practical question, if you think about it for half a second. Where can I leave the car. Where can I park. The search engine, being literal, offers an answer that is almost philosophical: places where you cannot.

There are not many. Corrour, of course. Altnabreac, lost in the Flow Country of Caithness, where the station house is empty and the road never arrived. Dunrobin Castle, which technically has a lane but feels like it belongs to another century. A few others that qualify depending on how strict you are about what counts as a road. A track, a hill path, a permissive mile of bog.

Corrour is the one people know. It is the highest station on the main line, seventeen miles from the nearest public road, set on Rannoch Moor like a thought that was left behind. No car park, no drop-off loop, no rank of taxis idling. There is a station house that is now a restaurant with rooms, a signal box, and wind. In 1996, Ewan McGregor and company walked out of it in Trainspotting and into the myth. Most people who get off there now have rucksacks and good boots and a return ticket they have already checked twice.

What does it mean for a place to refuse cars. We are so used to stations as interchanges, as places where one mode of transport apologizes for another. The entire choreography of modern travel is about seamlessness, about not breaking stride between car and train and plane. The remote Scottish stations decline the choreography.

You arrive by rail, and if you wish to leave by any other means, you must walk. For a long time. Over ground that does not care about your itinerary.

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I once got off at Corrour because I had missed a connection and then, out of some mild perversity, decided to keep missing it. It was late August. The moor was not bleak, as moors are supposed to be in books; it was green and gold and very busy with insects. The train pulled away and took its noise with it. That is the first thing you notice. How much noise a train takes away when it goes.

There were three other people on the platform. We nodded at each other in the way of people who have all made a slightly unusual decision. One was waiting for the next train south. Two were setting off toward Loch Ossian, following the estate track that is not a road, not really. No one offered a lift, because there was no lift to offer.

In such places, your freedom is curtailed in a way that feels oddly like a gift. You cannot improvise a new plan that involves a car. You cannot call someone to come get you, at least not easily. You have to stand with the decision you made when you bought the ticket. The timetable, that humble, bureaucratic document, becomes a kind of promise. It says, I will come back for you. At 12:42, or 15:17, if all is well.

We talk a lot about access now. Every place should be accessible, which usually means accessible by car. We pave a little closer, we add a little signage, we smooth the edges until a place is no longer itself but a version of itself that can be driven to. The stations without road access resist this. They remain conditional. You can visit them, but only on their terms, which are narrow rails and a willingness to wait.

It is not inconvenience for its own sake. It is a reminder that remoteness is not a failure of infrastructure. It is infrastructure's decision to stop.

There is a romance to it, of course, and romance is not to be entirely trusted. It is easy to be romantic about a platform in summer when you have a return ticket in your pocket. Harder in February, when the light goes at three and the wind finds the gaps in the waiting shelter. But even then, there is something bracing about a place that does not want to be convenient.

The board at Inverness stopped blinking. The train came in low and silver, hissing on the wet rail. People stood, gathered bags, performed the small, private rituals of boarding.

I kept thinking about those platforms further south and north, empty now, waiting without impatience.