A century ago, Britain's rail network was the envy of the world.
You could get a train from almost anywhere...
..to almost anywhere else.
But many of these lines were considered unprofitable,
and in the 1960s, Dr Beeching was recruited by the government to come up
with a plan that would stop the railways from haemorrhaging money.
He famously brought the axe down on over 4,000 miles of track
and 2,000 stations.
Almost overnight, 30% of the network was closed down.
50 years on, I'm going on a journey to discover just a few of
those lost lines.
Feels like a lost world.
Over the series, I'm going to meet colourful characters that
remember the railways...
"Dead body here," he said to me.
Good Lord, the chaps had collapsed and died in the train.
Visit the places that are lost, but not forgotten...
This is old railway archaeology through here.
Oh, wow, look at this.
It is truly impressive.
And experience what Britain was like at the height of the
biggest transport revolution this country has ever known.
I've come north of the border.
I'm walking the Morayshire Railway, from Elgin, to Portsoy.
It's not often that a lost railway begins with something so
solid and intact as this.
It's Elgin railway station.
It's not the original.
That was built back in 1852, when the line first opened.
This replacement is a much grander creation,
built in Scottish Baronial style in 1902,
and by then, the railways were at their height.
They were invincible.
It must have seemed like they'd last for all time.
But less than 70 years later,
the Morayshire Railway would be lost forever.
Oh, wow, look at this.
Elgin Station is used as offices nowadays, which is a blessing,
as it means the building has been remarkably well-preserved.
It feels like the last train has only just left.
That's lovely.
But that's just the start.
This was your entrance onto what you came here for.
This rusty old railway track is the last remains of the
Morayshire Railway, a line that began here in Elgin.
I'm going to follow the trackbed first to the port and fishing
town of Lossiemouth,
then I'll double back and trace the route along the once thriving
fishing villages along the Moray and Aberdeenshire coast
to Portsoy.
Where tractors now roam, steam engines once chuffed.
I'm on the lost railway track from Elgin to Lossiemouth.
It's as straight as any Roman road, which reflects the single-minded
ambition its investors had to make as much profit from it as possible.
Back in the late 1800s, Elgin was a prosperous,
landlocked town and it considered Lossiemouth as its own private port.
This railway offered a fast, direct link to the coast for the
fresh fish from local waters,
as well as a more foreign commodity.
Elgin is in the heart of whisky territory and for many years,
a crucial ingredient for the production of whisky here
was sherry barrels from Spain.
Lossiemouth is a very pleasant surprise,
known locally as the "Riviera of the North"
due to the warm gulf stream and exceptionally mild climate.
It also has a fabulous beach.
Rumour has it that the sand dunes were made by burying old
railway carriages in the sand.
Talking of railways, I'm looking for the end of the line,
which I'm guessing will be where the land meets the sea.
I'm sandwiched here between the mouth of the River Lossie on
this side, hence Lossiemouth,
and the road just here.
So, the line came all the way up into the station,
which would have been just up here, but as far as I can tell,
there's absolutely no sign of the railway track,
or the station here any more.
But what interests me is that there's a very short section
of track that extends just beyond the station and I'm wondering
if that goes all the way to the dockside.
More than 300 years ago, the wealthy businessmen of Elgin financed the
building of a substantial harbour, with a proper deep water dock.
As a result, Lossiemouth was transformed into a busy seaport.
Well, this is pretty much a straight line from the old station back
there and I reckon this old rusty bit of iron here is also a clue.
This, I'm pretty sure, is a bit of old railway track.
So, how far does it go?
It does, it continues right up there.
Sherry barrels from Spain would have been off-loaded all along the
dockside here.
I've arranged to meet Dennis Malcolm,
from the Glen Grant Whisky distillery.
Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho!
Lovely. These are beautiful.
Yeah, sherry casks.
Straight from Spain, hold 250 litres of whisky,
and how else can they come but by boat?
Absolutely. Excellent place here
to off-load them onto the train and straight up to the distillery.
Elgin's right at the heart of whisky territory,
but how dependant is the success of some of the Scotch and the
distilleries in the area on the railway being here?
I would have said it was vitally important for the majority of
them because it would've cut the costs down considerably.
Because the big seaports are down in the south of Scotland and they would
have to come up by horse and cart, or steam engines in these days.
Yeah. So, the railway line was very, very innovative for this area.
Talk me through the process of how these sherry casks
are used in making Scotch whisky?
Scotch, when it's made, is crystal clear.
It's like vodka.
So, when we fill it into sherry casks, it's been filled with
sherry before, we get this lovely colour from the sherry wood.
You get different flavours and you get better aromas,
so really it enhances the product. It's lovely.
And so, with the length of time that a whisky is left to...
What is it doing? What do you call that when it's left in there?
It's sleeping, waiting for the right moment.
And so... OK.
During its slumber then, however long that hibernation might be,
does that determine the flavour, how long it's left in the cask?
Yes, it does. It's an interaction between the wood and the sherry
that's been in it before and the single malt.
Sadly, these barrels are empty,
but with 50 distilleries on Speyside alone, I'm sure I'll get my
chance to sample some of the hard stuff later on.
Before whisky, the industry this coast was best known for was
fishing and the fishing boats operated from the beach.
Kathleen Witham and two volunteers from the local museum have
agreed to talk to me about the unusual way in which fishing
was conducted here and how the railway changed everything.
I've heard it was fishermen's wives who'd actually carry their
husbands out to their fishing boat,
carry them out into the water.
I mean, is that really true? It is true.
Fisher women who would have looked very much like you do here?
Yes. Yes. Yeah, yeah.
Well, I would say that's their Sunday best, if they had old clothes on. It was their Sunday best.
She's got on piggy back.
Look, he's on her back, coming out to sea. Oh, does she?
Yeah. That's the woman underneath. He is.
And there's her, look.
Are they holding up their skirts there as well?
Yeah, they're holding up their skirts.
They tuck them into their bloomers, that's what they did.
No self-respecting woman would let her man go to sea with wet feet.
If their clothes were wet, it's going to be wet for the whole trip.
They couldn't take them off and walk in, could they? No, no, no.
I think half of them enjoyed it. Well, that's what I'm thinking.
The hard, arduous life that was very laborious, I would say.
It would have been.
So, carrying their husbands out to sea, loading up, and what,
they'd take the fish off to then be sold would they?
No, they would gut the fish and take them off to be sold, right?
But, I mean, they had a lot more tasks than that.
When the boat come in at night, had to drag the boat up on the beach.
He's sitting there like Jock, in the boat,
and she's dragging the boat up.
So, how did the railways impact this quite heavy role of the fisherman's wife?
Well, they used to walk ten miles, right?
To go and sell the... To go and sell the fish,
and then she would walk back.
When the railways came,
they could get the railway from Buckie Station, up to Keith.
So the railway, actually, had quite a large impact on the
communities and the lives of those fishing families. Yeah.
All along the Moray Coast. Yeah, that's right.
You only need to scratch the surface
to discover countless ways in which the railways changed
communities up and down the country forever.
I'm going to discover how the railways helped bring one of
Scotland's most lucrative exports to market and learn about an
entirely new kind of railway passenger.
Pigeons as well. Pigeons, pigeons, pigeons.
I'm walking the Morayshire Railway,
from Elgin to Lossiemouth,
and along the coast, to Portsoy.
The line was built to service the local whisky and fishing industries.
I've come back almost all the way to Elgin.
I'm trying to find this point on my map here,
where the Morayshire Railway
branches off from that straight section of track,
all the way up to Lossiemouth,
and heads out east, along the coast.
Now, it's not actually that easy to find. I mean, look at this.
You've got to remember,
this disused railway hasn't been here for decades.
Nature has truly taken over.
But finding this junction isn't necessarily going to be easy.
So, I've enlisted the help of a couple of railway ramblers.
Now, these guys walk and retrace disused railways as a hobby,
and let me tell you, they are the elite.
Being a railway rambler takes Tony Jervis and Mike Ellison all
over the country.
They've walked hundreds of miles in their attempts to track down
every last twist and turn of Britain's lost railways.
Are you trying to find the spot here, are you?
This junction here?
Yes, trying to work out exactly where the junction was actually, that's right.
There's very little left of the railway. This is...
Through here's the line to Lossiemouth. Absolutely, and that's straight as a die, is it?
It's straight as a die and that was the original and roughly where we think the actual junction is,
probably just about where the big tree is,
and then the Moray Coast Railway's dropping down
and goes through these woods.
That's what I'm trying to find and it's not easy, is it?
I'm glad you chaps are here, to give me a hand on this one.
LAUGHTER
Thank goodness for the railway ramblers.
It's like the army calling in the SAS when things get a bit sticky.
And who would've thought this forest in the making would've been the
route of the railway?
We're on the line now, aren't we?
Somewhere it's up the line here, yes.
It's got to be here somewhere.
When the railway came through,
you might have had a row of trees on either side growing. Yeah.
And occasionally, you would get people throwing apple cores,
or things out of the train carriage window and then you would get
random apple trees growing.
Oh, what, you do now, on disused railway lines?
On disused railway lines. So, you get fruit for free.
HE LAUGHS
I'm reluctant to say goodbye to Tony and Mike just yet.
They're so good at this.
I persuade them to stay and help me with my next challenge.
So, you think there might be a site of a railway along here somewhere,
cos we're not actually on the track here now, are we? We're not, no. Just likely off it onhere.
Trying to get a view of it. We might see something coming through these fields.
Whoa, there's a bridge. Did you spot? Yeah.
Cos I thought I caught something out the corner of my eye.
So, what's that doing there?
That's taking...
The railway's going over the top.
Yeah, that's east that way, isn't it?
East's that way, yes. That's right, yes.
So, the railway was heading that way. That way, yes.
And it's coming across through those fields, over that bridge,
and then squeezing between that hill and those buildings.
It does and then it pops round... And then popping around those trees.
It just curves round to the right after that. You can see that on there.
It just curves round slightly. Just a gentle curve, yes.
Basically, this bridge would've actually been approached by an embankment on both sides.
Quite good condition still. But it's in very good condition.
Yes, well, in Victorian times, they built to last. Yes, they did.
You know, today we might build something and expect to
replace it entirely in 25 years. Yeah.
Then, as far as they were concerned, they were building for ever,
you know, they had foresight,
but not to the extent of seeing railways would become unnecessary,
that would be replaced by motorways and things like that.
Gents, thank you very much for your help here today.
I would not have found this without you, so thank you for that.
I might of easily walked past that.
I feel like I am better equipped now to...
To know what to look for and where to look for it.
To know what to look for and where to look and just to keep my eyes
really wide open the whole time. Well, that's right, exactly.
Yes. Gents, thank you very much indeed.
Really fun. It's lovely to meet you both. No problem at all.
I'm about to cross the River Spey,
one of the most revered rivers in Scotland.
Famous, not only for its salmon fishing,
but also for the purity of the water it provides the local whisky distilleries.
And this is Spey Viaduct -
Finished in 1886 and built to carry the Morayshire railway.
Imagine the excitement of crossing this for the first time,
pulled along by a massive steam engine,
pumping out billows of white steam.
The Spey is Scotland's fastest flowing river and the exact
route the water takes, through this wide river mouth here, depends
upon the time of year and the flows that are coming down the river.
For me, that makes this bridge much more impressive than just its
beautiful visual impact.
Construction on this started in 1883,
and the engineers had to sink
the foundations for the piers using vast iron cylinders,
called caissons, up to 50 feet down into the riverbed,
to ensure they were solid enough, so heavy trains passing across
the strong currents weren't washed away down the river.
Multiple floods and unpredictable flows were a constant
challenge here and often delayed progress.
But the bridge eventually opened in 1886 and was a crucial part
of the line until it closed in 1968.
For me, the huge central arch span across the middle there is
its crowning glory.
At the time it was built,
it was the longest in Scotland and one of the longest in Britain.
That makes this bridge one of the unsung heroes of the
Morayshire Railway.
To see for myself why this railway was routed to cross the river
so close to the estuary, I'm going to take a detour downstream.
The River Spey has a reputation for being one of the best salmon
fishing rivers in the world.
By the 1950s and '60s,
salmon fishing was conducted on an industrial scale.
It wasn't uncommon to land anything up to 2,000 fish a day.
I'd be happy just to land one.
Local Steve Johnston has been fishing this river for years.
Try and start low. Start low.
Keep the rod tip down low,
let the tension in the line build and then, in one motion, come up.
Yeah. So, come up.
Right. Up there? Right, and then lower the rod in a sweeping action.
OK.
Steve knows every inch of this river and he's an expert on Spey casting,
which is apparently essential for fishing in wide, fast-moving
rivers like this.
On the far end. Every fisherman's dream is to have the nice tension in
the line, cast it out far and then fly land perfect and then come
round and then zip-zip, you catch the salmon.
And in it comes. Salmon takes off and your legs turn to jelly.
That's what everybody wants, like,
that's the good thing about the fishing.
That was good. Ohh!
That was good. That felt great.
There is something very tranquil about being out here as well isn't it? Yeah.
I mean, maybe not with me getting the line all tangled up,
but other than that, it's very peaceful.
Ooh!
All he needs is a fish now.
That felt good.
Truth is, I never caught a fish,
but I could easily be tempted back to try again.
At one point, the scale of the freshwater fishing industry
here was phenomenal,
and with that scale came the need for a vast fish processing industry.
Now, most of that's gone now and it's very quiet and tranquil here,
but a crucial part of it still remains -
disused and frozen in time.
This is the Tugnet Ice House - three turf-roofed vaulted chambers,
sunk deep into the ground, to store hundreds of tonnes of ice,
that would keep the salmon catch fresh until it could be taken
to the nearest railway station.
How are you? Absolutely.
The entrance to the ice house is below ground level.
The minute you get in here, you can feel the temperature drop.
Showing me around is Jim Gordon.
It's a lovely summer's day outside today,
but you walk in here and straight away it gets chilly.
It's cold in here. It is.
This is what it's designed for,
to keep the ice, obviously, for the duration of the season.
How much ice would you have here, at the peak of the winter?
Oh, a lot of tonnes of ice.
Kind of up, up and a bit?
Oh, it would've been well up the walls, but near right top.
This amazes me, because this... There's no refrigeration in here?
No, just the turfs on the top, insulated and deep into the ground.
When you said the turf...
Oh, the turf that's laid across the top of the roof? Yeah, yeah.
Over this arched roof. That's insulation, yeah.
I guess the walls are pretty thick for themselves as well?
Oh, they're very thick, and then they're down in the bowels of earth. Down in the earth. Yeah.
So, what happened with the fish when they were packaged and iced
and boxed up here?
Well, the farmer had stayed up in the village,
which is about a mile away, had a loft and he went up the stair.
There's a flagpole up here and the man in the fish house put up
the flag so the farmer could see it.
The fish were ready to go to the railway station and he would know to come down and pick 'em up.
The railways meant that fish could be processed, packaged and
sent out much quicker, meaning that they arrived much fresher.
Within a few hours. Wow.
If you caught the trains at the right time, it was perfect.
So, the value that the railway brought to the fisheries
industry was huge. Oh, tremendous.
All along the coast.
It is chilly down here.
I'm going to suggest we get back outside and warm up a little bit.
This is lovely and I know where to come when it's really, really hot.
It's time to wend my way back upstream and rejoin the lost
railway line to find where all that freshly-iced fish was taken.
I've just come down the pathway here,
from the Spey Bridge,
and it's a very, very straight bit of old track along there.
I was right on the track.
The map here shows me that it crosses a roadway and then the
station is immediately after that.
Well, here's the road.
I wonder if I can actually get alongside and see if I can
find the station, or, what's left of it anyway.
It's hard to see if there's anything there, behind all these brambles and hedgerow here.
Oh, I say that - it suddenly clears.
Spey Bay sign on the side of the building and that looks very,
very much like the edge of a platform to me.
This has got to be it.
Wonder if I can go and have a little closer look.
I should try at least.
So this is where the salmon that was preserved by ice was brought,
to be transferred to the express train to London.
I bump into the current owner of the station, John Thompson.
I'm sorry, do you mind me coming in and saying hello?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I get a few folk coming here, you know.
Do you mind me asking, how long you've owned this, the old station?
I've lived in the house...
Bought the house in 1970 and bought the station in 1975.
You've kept it in really good condition, John.
Well, it wasn't always like this, it was pretty neglected.
So, this is the platform edge here, isn't it?
This is the platform, yeah.
So, you'd a had your line coming straight through here.
Yeah, there's actually two lines, you know.
You'd have had two lines at this point, yeah.
Basically a passing place, you know.
Yeah.
Wow.
I see you've got a few little bits of railway paraphernalia as well.
Yeah, yeah. These are nice.
Oh, booking office, look.
And the pigeons.
The pigeons, what in the basket?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They're racing pigeons. Racing pigeons, oh, OK. Yeah.
And have you actually...
Do you... These aren't just with the station here, these aren't just paraphernalia?
No, no, no, there's a couple of pigeons in here.
Have you got pigeons in there? Yeah, yeah.
Oh, hello.
LAUGHTER
These are your pigeons John?
These are two pigeons that's going to race at the weekend.
So, what, these used to be on the trains then?
These would go on the train every week.
A label on here to the Station Master. Yeah.
Please liberate, weather permitting, you know, and they would go,
you know, right to the South Coast.
The idea is that, they'd all set off
and the first one back was the winner. They would all set off.
I was very aware of the salmon and the whisky trade
that would have passed through here.
Yeah. But pigeons as well.
Pigeons, pigeons, yes. Marvellous.
I'm going to exchange railway trackbed for the ocean waves
in order to get up close to one of the biggest tourist
spectacles in the area.
Can we shoot through?
Can we shoot the boat through the rock?
Oh, this is absolutely beautiful.
I'm walking the Morayshire Railway, from Elgin to Lossiemouth
and along the coast to Portsoy,
and I'm now more than halfway into my journey.
I'm on the trail of the whisky and fishing industries this
railway was built to serve.
So, I've been heading east along the old trackbed and I'm just
arriving here in the town of Buckie,
and I'm pretty sure that this...
..space here is where the old station at Buckie was.
Got a photo of it here.
Yeah.
There's not much at all of that that remains here today.
In fact, I think the only thing that does remain is the abutment
behind me here, from this footbridge that went across the tracks there.
What you don't see in this photo is just how close the station
was to the harbour and this was a hugely important factor for
both the railway and the fishing industry.
Minimising the time and cost of putting fish onto trains to
be sent off around the country - crucially, making money.
But between being caught on the boat and packed on the trains,
the fish needed preparing and much of that happened in
a place like this.
You only need to cast your eyes around the harbour
to see that fishing has suffered a steady decline along this coast.
But, luckily, there's still one fish processor here I'm hoping
will be able to tell me what it was like before they'd closed the railway down.
Hello. Is it Jeanette? Yes, it is. Hi, Jeanette, I'm Rob.
Hi. Nice to meet you. Yeah, pleased to meet you.
This is lovely. Come through the back. Lovely, thank you.
All right.
Oh, we're into the heart of the business here. Yes.
These days, fish are finessed for the table by a highly-killed team,
but back in the days of the railway,
the quicker the fish could be iced and packed, the better.
It had a train to catch.
This is what the fish packing would have been like long ago.
Whole fish would have been packed in old whisky crates.
Literally like this? They wouldn't of had tops on the boxes?
No, no. Basically, pack your fish in, ice at the bottom,
cover it completely with ice at the top and stack them off and off it goes.
Were there many trains a day that left then,
that were packed full of fish?
I think your fish mainly had to be on the three o'clock train for
going south every day, so, Monday to Friday,
fish market five days a week.
And on that train, we're talking about the old railway line,
the old Morayshire Railway? Yes, yes. Yeah.
Just behind here.
Just behind here, yeah, I mean, convenient.
But, like I say, it had to be,
cos time was critical with it, wasn't it? Yes, yes.
Eat Mair Fish still do their own smoking.
It's a revelation to see that they burn wood shavings from old whisky
barrels to create the distinctive flavour of Scottish-smoked salmon.
Oh, here we go.
This is where the magic's going to happen, in not too long.
You want to shut the door, give that a minute.
And then it will build up? The smoke will build up.
Give it a minute, bit of time. And they'll hopefully get...
Do you normally smell, in the smoke then,
the sherry and the whisky from the old cask?
Can you smell it in the smoke a bit?
I think you do get a little aroma fragrance of it and it gives it a
nice sort of colour to it as well.
Yes.
Oh, that's lovely. Yeah, there is a...
Yeah, it's subtle, but it's there.
You're getting a bit of a... Just get the flavour.
..bit of a flavour off of the shavings, yeah.
Sort of the whisky, or the sherry casks.
And that's all going to go into these lovely sides of salmon.
The ultimate marriage of whisky and fish - Buckie-smoked salmon.
A product that would have attracted premium prices once the
railway had delivered them to the London fish markets.
Now, the Morayshire Railway had stations dotted all along the coast,
at small local fishing communities,
and another one of them was here in Portknockie.
But the railway also brought people here to come and witness a
natural phenomena - a rock formation just in the shallows off the coast
called Bow Fiddle Rock.
And it's called that because of the shape it takes,
which resembles the tip of a bow used to play the fiddle.
Now, this has been photographed, sketched and painted probably
thousands of times over the centuries.
A photo's not really good enough for me.
I want to get up close and really see it.
And that's why I've joined Alice Banks on a kayak across Cullen Bay.
Back in the '60s, the railway brought Alice here on childhood
holidays from her hometown more than 50 miles away.
People have been coming to see Bow Fiddle Rock here, well, for centuries.
Well, one century at least.
One, gosh. Well, yeah.
But, I mean, it's been a feature here for millions of years. It has.
I mean, people came...
Well, the railways brought a lot of people on holiday,
especially up from Glasgow.
Do you think it's something the railway would have advertised? "Come and see the coast...
Oh, yes, yes. "..and see this magnificent structure?"
Yes, you've got this lovely structure to walk to,
nice healthy walks on the cliffs.
Yeah. Beautiful sandy beaches to walk on.
You remember the railways coming through here then? Oh, yes, yes.
Cos we used them to come on holiday from Inverness.
Watching the train from a skylight window in a holiday cottage,
when I was meant to be asleep in bed.
When you were a young one? When I was young.
I would be, what, about seven or eight years old, I suppose,
at the time and there were still steam trains then.
I'm just thinking back then, when the train allowed people to
bring in, you didn't have the internet, maybe you didn't
have as many photos available, or as many ways to see things like this.
The only way to see it was to come and see it and the railway
made that possible. Yes.
Can we shoot through? Can we shoot the boat through the rock? Yeah, we can shoot.
You go first, then.
I'm conscious of looking up, Alice, cos there's a lot of sea birds
in here and I can see what they're doing.
If I look up, they're going to drop.
Well, there's some in a nest just up to your right. I can see them here.
Yeah.
Not concerned by us at all,
cos we're not sort of getting too close to them.
Oh, this is absolutely beautiful.
It's everything - it's the sensation, it's the noise,
it's the feeling of the water, it's the sound of the waves,
it's the sound of the birds. And the echo that you get.
It's everything about this that makes it unique. Yep.
Paddling through the arch of Bow Fiddle Rock was an
unforgettable experience.
But, as always, the lost railway calls me back.
The trackbed's going to take me to one of the most spectacular
sections of the Morayshire line.
Back in the days of the steam train, one can only imagine the
heady anticipation of arriving here for one's summer holiday.
After the steelwork of the Spey Viaduct further west,
stone was very much the material used when it came to
constructing the railway through here.
I've arrived in the small coastal town of Cullen and it has
four stone viaducts.
The longest of them is this one, that I've just come over.
It has eight arches across its length,
followed by a single-arched bridge and then two four arch viaducts,
as the railway headed further east.
Now, it's alleged that, the reason all these viaducts and crossings
were needed to get through the undulating land near the coast,
is that the landowners further inland wouldn't allow the railway
to build on their much flatter estate.
In fact, a century or so beforehand, they moved the whole town of
Cullen nearer the coast, for the same reason.
Now, that might have given the Great North of Scotland Railway a bit
of a headache and a hefty bill,
but personally, I'm quite happy with the outcome,
cos it leaves us with these beautiful Victorian structures
that I think perfectly frame the picturesque town and landscape.
I'm already familiar with Scotch whisky's demand for
sherry barrels from Spain, but frankly,
I'd like to get a bit closer to the spirit inside those barrels.
It's strong. Feel no pain.
I'm getting... That's warm.
Yes. Oh, that's warm.
I'm walking the Morayshire Railway,
from Elgin to Lossiemouth and along to Portsoy.
A coastline known for its fishing and its whisky distilleries.
I've arrived at the site of the old Glassaugh Station.
I mean, I'm in the middle of a field, but look here.
This is the platform edge that runs all along here and what
strikes me about this station is just how isolated it is.
There are a few properties dotted about,
very few, but even then, some of those, I reckon,
have been built after 1968, when this line shut down for good.
Let's just have a little look.
See if there's anything else to take note of.
I mean, there's no station building up here now, whatsoever.
You can see how overgrown it is.
Ah, let's have a look here though.
Well, that's definitely the main platform that runs all the
way along there. It's quite long.
But on this side,
there's what looks like a small goods siding in here.
I reckon that would've been used to load goods on and off of the train.
So, not just passengers on this side, but, yeah, freight,
and along this line, that's going to be one of two things -
fishing or whisky.
Now, Glassaugh was never known as a prominent fishing port,
so that leaves whisky.
That's convenient because,
just here is the Glenglassaugh Whisky Distillery.
Now, how to get to it?
Follow the railway out the field.
Must be.
Glenglassaugh was first established back in 1875.
The site was chosen for the pure water supply nearby and easy
access to local barley fields,
but also because this was the site of an illegal still,
that was reputed to have made some of the best whisky for miles.
I've come to meet distillery manager Alan McConnochie.
How important was the railway to the establishment of the
distillery here?
Because, well, the station's just at the end of your entrance here.
Well, it was important to the whole area.
You know, many years ago,
people talk about peaty whisky and so forth. Yeah.
Until the railways opened up the whole of Scotland, well,
peat was the only source of fuel. Yeah.
So, all whiskys would've had a peaty character...
That peaty smokiness.
..back in the day.
So, when the railways opened up,
they allowed coal to come north, a much more efficient source of heat
and, again, played with the flavours of the whisky that's produced.
The railways opened up everything,
as regards to whisky production in Scotland.
Glenglassaugh is capable of distilling one million litres
of whisky a year.
I'm keen to get into the distillery myself and see how the
spirit's made.
Coarsely ground barley is mixed together with hot water,
to create the mash, as it's called.
Once this is fermented, it's distilled twice in giant copper
pot stills and the resulting liquid gushes forth in the spirit safe.
Oh, the heat off that.
Yeah.
So, here we have a sample of unique whisky that we produced
earlier and we can have a little nose and taste.
It's about 68, 69% alcohol.
Am I all right drinking that?
I mean, I won't do the whole lot obviously, but...
You'll be OK. Yeah.
So, I think whisky, even though it doesn't look like whisky.
I mean, it's strong.
Feel no pain. I'm getting... That's warm.
Yes. Oh, that's warm.
This is a quality control.
Quality control on the look, the smell and the taste?
Yes.
I won't taste anything for weeks after that.
It's nice, though. I mean, that is the feeling you get from Scotch,
just maybe tenfold.
It's a bit sharper at the moment, but the cereal nose is in there and
then the maturation in the cask will bring all those characters together.
All the notes, the characters.
Listen, Alan, than you so much. It's lovely to see all this.
No problem. Being in this area, it's iconic for its whisky.
To come and see how all of that is made, it's lovely.
No problem. Thank you very much indeed. It's a pleasure. Thank you.
Would you like some more?
LAUGHTER
I'm approaching the end of my journey -
Portsoy, the jewel in the crown of the fishing hamlets
along this coast.
This is Portsoy railway station.
TRAIN HORN BLOWS
It's the local scout hut now.
I've come to meet Roger Goodyear.
Hi, Roger, it's very nice to meet you. This station was in operation until the '60s,
when dear Dr Beeching joined the organisation, closed this, and this,
I have to say, was one of the lines where the rumour is that the figures were cheated,
because it was a busy line,
particularly for the fish industry and whisky.
Am I right in thinking there was also a bit of track that went
all the way down to the harbour?
Can we go and have a look? Let's go and have a look.
Although the line continued on south and then east from Portsoy,
an earlier line ventured down what for a train must have been a
very steep hill to serve the harbour a few hundred yards away.
Do you feel the slope now?
HE LAUGHS
It is... It's dropping away under my feet, Roger. Yes, yes.
This is quite some slope, yeah.
It is, it is.
Reputably, if not the steepest,
certainly one of the steepest lines ever laid in Britain.
Wow.
And, of course, it was too steep.
They could only ever run an engine up or down with one wagon.
Really? Well, that must have been quite prohibitive,
to getting goods up and down from the harbour.
Cos, I imagine, that was the purpose of this line,
to feed and to extract fish. Oh, yes.
For fish and other goods that were being transported up and down.
So, was it a problem then?
Was this too...
It was too steep. It was too steep, yeah.
The Portsoy harbour train must have been an astonishing but
terrifying sight.
It ran for just 25 years,
only to be closed in 1884, and probably just as well.
The restored trackbed takes you right down to the harbour,
just as the train once did.
It's all happening down here.
Yes, well, this is the annual Scottish Traditional Boat Festival.
In 1993, Portsoy celebrated its tercentenary,
and ever since, there's been an annual boat festival.
Anything up to 16,000 people descend on this tiny village.
In a way, it celebrates the heritage of what Portsoy's always been about. Absolutely.
Yes, yes and the whole of the northeast of Scotland.
Fascinating heritage and a great opportunity to bring together
people to see what the history meant and what it means today.
CHEERING
HORN BLOWS
For centuries, the people of the small communities all along the
Morayshire Coast have worked hard to live off the land and the sea.
Their economy driven by the whisky distilleries and fishing ports,
and for 80 years, both industries enjoyed a huge
boost and convenience brought about by the Morayshire Railway.
Now, times have inevitably moved on,
but if walking this lost railway has taught me one thing,
it's that the community spirit here is as strong as ever.
Next time, I walk the lost Woodhead railway line in Yorkshire...
Here starts one of the most heroic railway routes ever conceived.
I'm told horror stories about its construction...
These people were exposed to a level of danger that we cannot
imagine today.
..and I get a miniature taste of the joy this line brought.
Woohoo!
Subtitles by Red Bee Media