The Jacobite Train in Enchanted Highlands — Print & Oil Painting

No paint anywhere. This is a photograph, made from the hillside above, of a real steam train crossing a real bridge, and it earns its place in a collection of fan art by showing the one location the films never had to invent.

The viaduct runs from lower left to upper right in a long shallow curve, part of a run of twenty-one arches in bare grey concrete standing on tapered piers. It was poured in the closing years of the nineteenth century and never faced with stone, so the patching and the water stains are all visible from here. The line it carries is the West Highland, between Fort William and Mallaig.

The train is on it: a black locomotive with a red running plate at the head, then a string of maroon carriages with passengers showing as pale marks in every window, and a slow plume of white steam rolling back across the hillside and losing its shape as it goes.

Everything else is grass. The hill fills the top of the frame in a dozen greens, from the black-green of birch scrub along the bottom to a bright acid green where the sun lands, and one dark conifer breaks the line of the parapet on the right. That wall of green is what carries the red of the carriages across the full width. Part of our Harry Potter collection. For where the line is going, see the castle above its loch, and for the house at the other end of the holidays, the Burrow.