Model train enthusiasts built 'biggest little railway in the world' across 71-mile Great Glen

Scotland has a storied history of rail travel. The Flying Scotsman, which runs between Edinburgh and London, is one of the most famous trains in the world, while the imposing Forth Bridge is also a global icon.

The Glenfinnan Viaduct is one of the country’s most popular tourist attractions and featured in the Harry Potter film series, with the Hogwarts Express steaming its way over the stunning structure. Despite all this, one area resisted railway engineers for centuries due to its challenging landscape of hills, lochs, waterways and forests.

The Great Glen links Fort William, just a short drive from Glenfinnan, to Inverness. And the 71-mile stretch had never been serviced by a railway – until 2017, when a group of model train enthusiasts embarked on an epic and entertaining project.

Dozens of rail buffs came together to build a miniature track as part of Channel 4 series ‘The Biggest Little Railway in the World’, which aired in 2018. A crack team of 56 volunteers was assembled for the task, which involved laying tracks across fields, paths, canals, up mountains and hills, over drops, and around obstacles.

The five-part show documented an incredible fortnight where presenters Dick Strawbridge and Claire Barrett led their team in the unique project. The group was made up of real-world rail engineers and workers, basement builders, and dedicated enthusiasts, and faced near-impossible challenges, pesky midges, and geographical puzzles.

Speaking ahead of the show’s initial airing in 2018, Dick said: “Television allows you to do bonkers ideas. We started off in conversations with the production team, discussing silly ideas, and talked about the scale of a model railway and how in Scotland the Victorians hadn’t been able to get across the Highlands.

“All of a sudden it gets legs, and then becomes, ‘We can do this’. It might be hell but we are going to have a go. The scale is about 46-1, so small, the train is so tiny that the trip from Fort William to Inverness is (equivalent to) half the distance of the Trans-Siberian railway. One of the hills we went up, to scale, we were taking it up one-and-a-half times the height of Everest.”

Volunteer team leader Lawrence Robbins said: “Just because it’s bonkers doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.” Claire added: “You can’t quite get your head around it. Even when you say it out loud, it sounds like a joke, doesn’t it?”

With teams sent out across the Highlands to lay track and conquer obstacles, Claire was in charge of the heavy building and more complex tasks. While Dick followed the train’s progress, she was working ahead of time to make sure the Silver Lady steam engine had somewhere to go when it caught up with their progress.

Claire said: “Three days in, the train started to move. No one knew whether it would work or not, if we had the right engine, the right system, the right rails, how the public would react or how we would cope.

“So when it sent off and did the first tiny bit of its journey, there was an amazing kind of euphoria amongst the teams. Three days in, we had already become a community. If you throw people into a difficult situation with a challenge, they rise to it.

“At the first, there was an immense feeling of success tempered by realism because we really knew just how far 70 miles was going to feel and that was scary.

“There was a point part way through the build when there were just too many demands – the stress of how the train was going and managing not just the two build teams but also people’s expectations of what a tiny train can do in the real world.

“But it was also a lot of fun and that comes through in the programme how much fun you can have if you set a ridiculous challenge.”

Retired RAF man and former offshore sub engineer Derek Souter was delighted with the challenge. He said: “When I heard we were covering a distance of 71 miles in two weeks I wondered how we would do it.”

“I build model railways and you are talking weeks and weeks just to lay a couple of metres of track. We did it in three-metre sections of track which fitted together easily, so it didn’t really need to be laid, it was more a case of throwing it on the ground and sticking it together.

“With a model train you take ages to get it level and immaculate, but there was not the same degree of finesse with this, we just got it done.”

Derek was one of the main builders on the project and he and his team had to plan the track so that the 3.3kg Silver Lady would have as gentle a gradient as possible on the journey. He said: “We were the elite builders to overcome major obstacles, build bridges and viaducts, things like that.

“We had to replicate real world solutions into the model world. One of the bridges we built, if to scale, would be something like 600m long. That was great fun.”

Lawrence, a retired mortgage collection officer, worked with his team to find real world solutions to their model problems. He said: “This was an active landscape, with people walking, cycling, hiking, traffic driving, forestry commission felling trees and lots of onlookers.

“The biggest challenge for me was Invermorrison, where we had to scale 500ft very rapidly. With scale, that’s 11,000ft – the same as the highest railway station in Europe, in Switzerland, where they took six years to build a line.

“We had to come up with real-world solutions very quickly. We had to build a train ferry to go under a bridge on the canal before the Forth Bridge, a train ferry was used to get to Edinburgh.

“We also had to use winches and counter balance systems, like they used in Welsh slate mines. We built bridges from wood, had wheels machined up, and everyday we had amazing challenges and had to find brilliant ways of overcoming them.”

All the problem solving was sure to take its toll on the volunteers, but Dick revealed that it was more than just a mental challenge. He said: “It was physically gruelling, we had different ages, men, women, young, old, everyone just pulling together with the desire to see the Silver Lady, our little train, get from one side of Scotland to the other.”

Derek added: “Model-wise, it was a great achievement and something special to be part of. At the start, it was about laying train tracks but it became something more, about the relationships between young and old, a real sense of overcoming the conditions and there was a great sense of camaraderie. It was great.”

Don’t miss the latest news from around Scotland and beyond. Sign up to our daily newsletter.