The Wrong Platform

Diego Morales had been in Scotland for exactly nine days, and he was beginning to think he had the place figured out. He could order a coffee without being asked to repeat himself. He had learned that "wee" meant small and that "dreich" meant the weather. So when his roommates invited him to spend Saturday in Edinburgh, he told them confidently that he would meet them there. Seldom has a young man been so wrong about so many things in a single day.

Glasgow Queen Street was busy that morning. Diego, who was running late and listening to music, glanced at the departures board, saw a train leaving from platform 6 at 9:15, and ran for it. No sooner had he sat down than the doors closed and the train pulled out of the station. He put his bag on the rack, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.

Only when he woke up, nearly an hour later, did he realize that something was not quite right. Outside the window there were no suburbs, no highways and no castle on a hill. There were mountains. There was a loch the color of steel. There were, as far as he could tell, more sheep than people. At no point on the journey to Edinburgh, his roommates had assured him, would he see anything more dramatic than a shopping center.

Little did he know that he was on the West Highland Line, heading north towards Fort William. By the time he had worked this out, with the help of an elderly lady who found the whole thing hilarious, the train was slowing for a tiny station in the middle of an enormous empty moor. "Get off here, love," the lady advised. "There's no other stop for ages, and the stationmaster will sort you out."

Never in his life had Diego seen a station so small. It had one platform, one bench, a wooden hut with a stove and a single, very calm man in a high-visibility jacket. The stationmaster looked at Diego, at his city shoes and at his face, and said, without any apparent surprise, "Edinburgh?"

"How did you know?" said Diego. The man sighed. "Not a month goes by without someone getting on the wrong train at Queen Street. Hardly a week, in the summer. You're the third this year from Spain. I've had Italians, Americans, a whole choir from Germany once." He opened the door of the hut. "Next train back is at four. Kettle's on."

Under no circumstances, Diego had told himself that morning, would he waste his Saturday. Yet here he was, spending it in a hut on a moor, drinking strong tea with a man called Alasdair who had worked at the station for twenty-six years and appeared to know the name of every mountain, every bird and every train driver in the west of Scotland. Not once in the next five hours did Diego look at his phone, partly because there was no signal and partly because he did not want to.

Alasdair showed him the path up the nearest hill. From the top, Diego could see the railway running like a silver thread across the moor, a red deer moving slowly along the edge of a loch, and clouds racing over mountains whose names he could not pronounce. Not until much later did he understand that he was looking at one of the most famous views in Britain.

When the four o'clock train finally appeared, Alasdair shook his hand. "Come back on purpose next time," he said. "Most people who get lost here do." Diego reached Glasgow late that evening and found three messages from his roommates, each angrier than the last. He wrote back a single line: Sorry. Got lost. Best day so far.