A train is a strange place to wake up in. The first sound is mechanical — the muffled clack of the bogies finding the rail joints — and the second is the kettle in the corridor outside your cabin, which the steward has set to boil because he knows from yesterday that you take a tea before breakfast. The world outside the window is moving past at perhaps 40 miles an hour, which on a Scottish single-track line in April feels both very fast and very slow.
This is a dispatch from a single morning aboard the Belmond Royal Scotsman, the second day of a four-night itinerary north out of Edinburgh.
Six o’clock
I had asked for the tea at six because the train was scheduled to be drawing level with Dalwhinnie around half past, and I wanted to be at the window for it. The steward — a man named Kenneth who has worked the Royal Scotsman for nine seasons — knocked once and left the tray on the small fold-down table by the door. A pot of Assam, two small biscuits, a folded copy of the day’s schedule. The schedule said: arrive Boat of Garten 09:45, motor coaches to the Strathspey for the morning excursion, return for lunch on board.
The cabin is small but properly thought through. Twin beds in a dark olive linen, a long narrow window that runs almost the full length, a writing desk with a brass lamp, an en-suite the size of a generous coat closet with a marble basin and a working shower. The walls are tartan-papered in a quiet sett. The carriages were rebuilt in 1980s coachwork from older stock; the bones of the train are postwar British rail, but the interiors have been redone several times and the most recent refit shows.
The observation car
By twenty past six I had moved one car forward to the Observation Car, which sits at the rear of the train. This is the room the Royal Scotsman is famous for. Open verandah at the back, deep armchairs in tartan tweed, a small bar that is unstaffed at this hour but stocked, a wood fire that the night porter has just lit. I poured a second tea from the pot Kenneth had set out at the bar — there is always a pot at the back, refreshed at 6, 9, 12, 3, 6, and 9, train time — and stood at the rear window with the door propped open.
The air at the back of a moving train at six in the morning in the Highlands is a particular thing. Cold. Smelling of larch and wet earth and faintly of the diesel from the locomotive at the front. The track behind unspools at speed, two parallel silver lines vanishing into the trees. Sheep look up as the train passes and then go back to grazing. A heron stood in a stream we crossed and did not move at all.
Breakfast service
Breakfast on the Royal Scotsman runs in two dining cars — State Car 1 and State Car 2 — both done in mahogany panelling and brass fittings. Service begins at seven and runs until nine-thirty. Guests sit where they like; the maitre d’ will sit you with company if you want it or alone if you don’t.
I took a small table for two at the window of State Car 2 and was given a menu card that listed the day’s offerings in plain English with the producer named beside each item. The eggs were from a farm near Aberfeldy. The bacon was from a butcher in Pitlochry. The smoked salmon was from Inverawe. The porridge — and this is the kind of detail the train gets right — was specified as Hamlyn’s of Scotland pinhead oats, soaked overnight, served with a small jug of cream and a separate small jug of single malt, which is the proper Scottish way to do it and which most hotels in the country forget.
I ordered the porridge, the salmon, and a single poached egg on a slice of toasted soda bread. The porridge came first, hot enough to hurt. The salmon was cut thicker than the standard hotel slice and was lightly smoked rather than aggressively cured. The poached egg was exactly soft. A pot of coffee arrived without being asked. A small dish of butter pats was refilled twice.
The other guests
The Royal Scotsman carries a maximum of 36 guests. By eight, perhaps half of them were in the dining cars. The demographic skews older — sixties and seventies, mostly couples — but there were two younger pairs on this run, one Australian honeymoon couple and a pair of American sisters in their thirties travelling together. The conversation across the dining car was the low hum of strangers who have already met at dinner the night before and are now comfortable not having much to say at breakfast.
This is one of the quiet pleasures of the Royal Scotsman: the social rhythm of a small ship at sea, but on land. By the second day you know who is on board. By the third day you have favorite people and people you avoid. The train staff manage this geography with the discretion of a good country house — seating the people who get along together at the long table for dinner, leaving the introverts at the two-tops.
The window
The thing the train sells, finally, is the window. Between Dalwhinnie and Aviemore the line runs through Strathspey, with the Cairngorms rising on the right and pine forest pressed up against the track on the left. The light at this hour, in April, is a flat northern light — no warmth in it yet, but very clear. The window of State Car 2 framed it well. Two stags crossed a clearing as we passed. A small herd of red deer were grazing on a hillside above the line. The river ran beside the track for several miles, brown with peat, low at this time of year.
Nobody at any of the tables was on a phone. This is not because the signal was bad — though it was — but because the train has a quiet etiquette about it. Phones are used in cabins, not in public rooms. The result is that the dining car at breakfast sounds like dining cars used to sound: cutlery, low voices, the occasional laugh.
What I came away with
The Royal Scotsman is not the fastest way through Scotland, and it is not the most efficient. The same itinerary by car would take a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost. What the train sells is the slowing-down — the imposition of a 1920s pace on a modern trip, the requirement that you be in the dining car at seven if you want breakfast, the impossibility of skipping forward to the next thing.
By the time I got back to my cabin at nine, the train was easing into Boat of Garten and the day’s excursion was beginning to assemble in the corridors. I had been awake for three hours, had drunk two pots of tea and a pot of coffee, had eaten a proper Scottish breakfast, and had spent perhaps half of that time just looking out a window. That is the trade the Royal Scotsman offers, and it is a fair one.
Standing Questions
- Where does the Royal Scotsman depart from?
- All Royal Scotsman journeys begin and end at Edinburgh Waverley. Guests typically arrive the day before and stay overnight in the city; the train boards in the late morning of departure day after a champagne reception on the platform.
- How many passengers does the train carry?
- A maximum of 36 guests across the cabin accommodations. The high staff-to-guest ratio is one of the train's defining features and is felt most clearly at breakfast service, when the dining cars never feel busy.
- What is the cabin layout?
- Cabin categories include Twin, Double, and four Grand Suites (the train added two additional Grand Suites and retired its dedicated single cabins from the 2025 season). The Grand Suites have separate sitting and sleeping areas, larger en-suite bathrooms with showers, and personal service. All cabins on board have private en-suite bathrooms.
- How long are the itineraries?
- Routes range from a two-night Highlands taster to a six- or seven-night journey that reaches the western coast. Most guests book the four-night Classic Journey, which works north into the Highlands before returning to Edinburgh.
