The Next Stop: Inverness to Edinburgh, station by station
By: Simon Varrell
Format/Source: eCopy kindly provided by the author for review
After years travelling by train between Inverness and Edinburgh, Simon Varwell realised that he knew very little about the places he would merely pass through, and to which he would pay no attention as they rushed by in a train window blur.
So over the course of six days in 2012, he travelled the line and stopped at all twenty-three stations. It was a trip that led him to the unknown, the beautiful, the isolated, the depressingly mundane, the run-down, and the haunting. From picturesque Highland villages to post-industrial towns, and from crumbling castles to dodgy pubs, a host of curious nooks and crannies across Scotland lurking virtually on his doorstep were finally demystified.
He finished the week with some places he was eager to return to for a deeper exploration, and a few others he will be quite happy to never visit again…
I love train rides. All of my trips in Europe involved train travel and I’ve enjoyed every aspect of it: it was the only time I never grumbled about getting up early in the morning to reach the early train out of town, I got the hang of foreign-language kiosks to get tickets, I didn’t mind some of the older carriages that I ended up in. And most of all, I enjoyed the scenery; I could never get sick of just staring out of the window for a whole two hours, even on the wettest, gloomiest, snow-filled day.
Anyway, I’ve never been to the United Kingdom in any capacity so I was curious about this travelogue about train stops in Scotland. I received a copy of this title from the author, which I read in exchange for an honest review.
