Mallaig is far from the prettiest of Highland settlements, even when the weather is fine and you can look over the sea to the blue shapes of Skye and the Small Isles. Several rows of what could be prewar council houses stretch across the hill beyond the harbour; a mishmash of car parks, jetties and workaday buildings squats close to the railway terminus. When I last stayed in Mallaig, it was known as the biggest herring port in Europe and no public transport moved on Sundays. (Carless, I was trapped in the Marine hotel for the whole of a rainy weekend with a travelling salesman for Berkel, which he called "the Rolls-Royce of bacon slicers".)
Today, the herring have vanished, as well as the Sabbath-keeping, and smoke from the kippering sheds no longer smudges the view – and yet Mallaig remains a busy place. Ferries come and go and fishing boats land shellfish, which is driven away in refrigerated lorries to the markets of France and Spain. None of this activity, however, explains the hundreds of people who can be seen roaming Mallaig's few streets every afternoon between the beginning of May and the end of October, looking for something to do or to buy, or the presence of so many restaurants, or menus that include Thai fish curry at a Cornish price of £18 a plate. What do explain them are two enthusiasms, one for low fact and the other for high fiction, which are kindled in childhood and among many adults never entirely disappear.
The railway reached Mallaig from Fort William and the south in 1901; it was among the last big lines to be built in Britain, late enough to have its viaducts built of concrete by the contractor Robert McAlpine ("Concrete Bob"), and it traversed one of Europe's most spectacular and emptiest landscapes – lochs, mountains, sea inlets, moorland, with hardly anything large enough to be called a village along its 40-mile length. Its construction needed a large – and controversial – government subsidy, and its traffic never grew much beyond the two or three trains a day that carried fish boxes and a few dozen travellers to and from the Hebrides. It made little economic sense. Only 60 years after the line opened, it began to be threatened with closure. Few people would have guessed then that its commercial salvation would eventually be owed to a novel and a film, and first of all, to a hobby.
Railways became an amateur pastime as well as a means of transport during the last decades of the 19th century. The date is difficult to fix with any precision. Steam locomotives had a fascination that might be called nostalgic or historical as early as 1857, when Stephenson's 1825 engine, Locomotion, was put on a pedestal at Darlington for permanent public display. In the years that followed, professional men such as vicars and lawyers began to see the huge variety of trains and their continual technical progress as a pursuit offering a similar kind of pleasure to local historical research, philately, egg-collecting and butterfly-hunting. By the end of the century they had their own magazine and their own club, the Railway Club, the world's first society for railway enthusiasts, which was founded in London in 1899 and had its own premises with a library and leather armchairs. It was from these elite beginnings that the 20th century's great cult of trainspotting spread to even the roughest school playground, reinforcing a more general fondness for steam locomotives that many people had without knowing quite why, so that a sense of loss ran through Britain (more than in any other country) when, in the 1960s, it became clear that their day was nearly done.
Hundreds of them were saved from the scrapyards and restored to working order; dozens of branch lines repaired and reopened so that in the holidays Britain could be charmed by how it once was. It's hard to think that anywhere in the world has seen a more popular or successful preservation movement, or at least one run and largely funded by volunteers and not governments. Among them was a Lancashire GP, Peter Beet, who played a vital role in saving no fewer than 23 mainline locomotives, and set up a centre for their service and repair in Carnforth, which was funded and eventually owned by Sir William McAlpine, the great-grandson of Concrete Bob. Out of this business grew the West Coast Railway Company, which hires out engines, coaches and crew for steam excursions, and which since 1995 has run the Jacobite Express, with its two return trains a day in the high season between Fort William and Mallaig.
A film producer looking to shoot a fantastical train in a dramatic location would naturally turn to such a company, and so in three Harry Potter films, beginning with the first, the train to Hogwarts is seen crossing Concrete Bob's most famous creation, Glenfinnan's curved viaduct. The implication that if Hogwarts ever existed it would exist in Mallaig is a small implausibility set inside a far grander one. Nonetheless, the Jacobite Express still fills with Potter fans from all parts of the globe and always stops for a photo opportunity at Glenfinnan, which is where the real Bonnie Prince Charlie really raised his standard at the beginning of the '45 and marked as such by a real 60ft-high memorial; all of which reality is cast into shadow by the film of a modern fairytale.
What economic plan for this part of Scotland could have conceived 50 years ago that a good part of its future prosperity would come from steam engines and film locations? Or that private interests and passions – with apologies for that overused word – would lie behind the presence of each: the locomotive man and the novelist wanting to bring to life the dead and the yet unborn. JK Rowling is celebrated everywhere, but the locomotive men who devoted every spare hour of their lives to cleaning out boiler tubes or greasing axles live and perish more obscurely. Somewhere there should be a tomb to the unknown anorak.
Three cheers for the unknown anoraks of this world
The idea that fiction can swell an economy isn't new. I arrived in Mallaig last week aboard the fine old steamer Waverley, named after the hero of Walter Scott's first historical novel. Our ship was built long after Scott had fallen from fashion, but its name perpetuated the policy of its predecessor's owners, the North British Railway, which was so mad for Scott as a marketing ploy that it called almost everything it owned after his characters, from locomotives to steamships to its large station in Edinburgh.
Every May the Waverley sails from the Clyde on a series of voyages that take it round the Mull of Kintyre to the Hebrides. It's a handsome ship and the views are beautiful and unexpected; there can be no finer sea journey in Britain. But, again, the experience exists because of an enthusiasm rather than from the intervention of any government. Forty years ago this August, a group of Clyde steamer lovers led by a young chocolate salesman, Douglas McGowan, bought it for a pound.
We met on the ship last week. Why had he been so rash as to take on such a complicated project of expensive restoration and repair? McGowan mentioned childhood summers spent in Arran, the paddle steamer there and back – the need to keep a part of that time. To him and people like him, the unknown anoraks, we owe considerable thanks.
