Inverness: The fabled train ride isn’t as nice as the city

(This is the second of a three-part series on Scotland.)

INVERNESS, Scotland – I scroll Instagram more than a teenage girl.

I admit it’s a major character flaw. I’ll catch myself realizing I’ve just wasted 30-60 minutes of my life I’ll never get back. Algorithms are evil. They are the drug dealers of the Internet. They prey on your interests. They continually feed your addiction like a junkie who can’t get through the day without 30 cat videos.

Latching onto my viewing habits, Instagram feeds me a steady stream of sports highlights, workout tips and travel.

Last month one really hooked me. Moby-Dick couldn’t have disengaged.

I planned a week-long trip to Scotland for June and one single hit on a video about “Edinburgh Off the Beaten Track” led to an avalanche of videos about Scotland. Highlights of the isle of Skye. What You Must Do in Scotland. What Not to Do in Scotland. I think one was the Internet’s greatest oxymoron: Scotland’s best places to eat haggis. 

One, however, I played over and over: The Caledonian Sleeper.

The numbers

It’s a luxury 13-hour overnight train from London to Inverness and what caught me was it is on the prettiest stretch of scenery in Scotland. Or so I read. Beautiful cabins. Great food in a luxurious dining car. Comfy beds. And you wake up to glorious scenery.

I investigated. Sticker shock ensued. The cost for a Caledonian Sleeper cabin, which leaves London’s Euston Station at 9:15 p.m. and arrives in Inverness at 8:45 a.m., ranges from 385 pounds (€450) to 435 pounds (€508) one way for two people. It stops in Edinbuirgh but you can’t pick it up in Edinburgh and continue north.

Instead, I decided to skip London, fly to Edinburgh and buy tickets on Scotrail, Scotland’s normal passenger train. I paid €80 for two tickets from Edinburgh to Inverness and €83 for the return. I’ll see basically the same scenery for a fraction of the price. I miss out on the night of sleep but I won’t miss out on the “fabulous” scenery.

So Marina and I had a leisurely morning and arrived at Edinburgh’s Waverley Station for our 9:39 a.m. departure. Unlike the rest of Edinburgh, the outside of Waverley is as ugly as last week’s haggis. It’s flat and dull with a silver roof that looks like aluminum siding.

The train was fine. Roomy and clean with good legroom. It had no sleeper car or dining area but my eyes were glued to the window, watching Scotland roll by for five hours on a sunny 65-degree day.

The scenery

The first thing I noticed as we left Edinburgh’s northern outskirts were the destination signs were in English and Scots. It’s a nod to the 46 percent of the population who speak some of the country’s ancient language although we never heard it spoken our entire week.

We skirted along the North Sea and saw an oil rig in the distance and seaside villages with uniform red-tile roofs. We crossed a couple of huge bridges. In between glimpses of the sea we passed large expanses of green meadows and pointy steepled churches dominating towns’ landscapes.

The North Sea did not look inviting. Gray, vast and empty, it looked freezing. The beaches were nothing but mud bogs. A second-division soccer stadium went by in Kirkcaldy not far from a fairly barren municipal golf course. St. Andrews this was not.

So far, it was pretty underwhelming. I read the scenery improves the farther north you go. I wondered how far it was to Orkney Island. I think they only speak Scots there.

We changed trains in Perth, about a third of the way to Inverness. Our car filled. The Scottish couple sitting opposite us reeked. Suddenly I missed Italy’s disparaged train system.

The scenery changed languidly from long green fields to big green hills with a lazy river thrown in every few miles. We saw uniform gray stone houses. We passed a lake. We saw a horse farm at Kingusaic. We saw more sheep.

Marina slept, more from boredom than fatigue.

When we arrived in Inverness, we passed the sleek Caledonian Sleeper and I gave silent thanks for my investigation of finding cheaper transport. But one thought kept running through my brain about the famed Edinburgh-Inverness train ride.

What’s the big deal?

Welcome to Inverness

So we were stuck for the day in Inverness, a town some world-weary friends in my Travelers’ Century Club told me to avoid. “Go to Aberdeen instead,” they said. No. We were on our way to the isle of Skye and Inverness was where we picked up the rental car.

Our taxi took us to our room in the north end of town past handsome brick homes, stately mansions and warm inns. School children in matching uniforms walked past manicured lawns. 

Inverness is a wealthy city. On the shore of Moray Firth, an inlet that leads to the North Sea, Inverness was once of Great Britain shipbuilding centers. Today it’s a smart, fashionable town of about 50,000 with the second highest growth in economic productivity per person in the United Kingdom.

But most people – including us – use it as a jump off point or base to explore the luscious Scottish Highlands.

With an afternoon and a night to kill and knowing no more about Inverness than we did about a trade outpost in Mali, we took a bus to the city center. It’s compact, about four square blocks, lined with restaurants, high-end fashion stores and the unfortunate array of souvenir shops.

I learned the Henderson clan has its own tartan design. It’s green. I saw enough Loch Ness Monster dolls to outfit every boarding school classroom.

In one souvenir shop I asked the bubbly, middle-aged clerk for a local pub, away from tourists.

“You don’t want to go to a real local bar,” he warned. “You’ll get in a fight. They show up at 9 a.m., three deep. They’re pro drinkers.”

“So am I,” I said.

“Then have a crack,” he replied, giving the Scottish brogue term for “try.”

I did no such thing. 

River Ness

Instead, we went to the nearby 12th century Inverness Castle which stands on a hill right next to the city center. It was under heavy renovation and closed to the public, leading us to River Ness. 

Yes, it leads to Loch Ness just south of Inverness. And no, I didn’t ask anyone if they’ve ever seen the damn mythical monster. I cringed when reading about the 24-hour video camera on the water to record any sighting of “… the Loch’s most famous inhabitant.” 

The River Ness, and not the monster, is what makes Inverness special. That day I read in the Scotsman newspaper that the Ness is the only waterway out of 14 tested in Scotland that didn’t contain the potentially harmful chemical trifluoroacetic acid. 

It is just two blocks from the Center and a riverwalk on both sides stretches for miles. Inverness Cathedral with two huge block towers sits on the river where people jogged, mothers strolled their infants and lovers walked under a long line of stately trees.

After about a mile, the riverwalk leads to the Ness Islands. It’s a little wooded archipelago with Scots pine and sycamore trees linked by Victorian bridges. Friends and lovers sat in little pockets of tranquility between the trees.

Marina and I sat on a tree trunk and watched the river roll by. All we could hear was the gentle water and birds singing in the trees. In a week in Scotland, that little bit of peace was one of our highlights.

On the way back we stopped and had a Black Isle Lager at the elegant Glenmoriston Hotel,  a 200-year-old building that wasn’t much bigger than the expensive houses lining the river. Three well-educated college students sitting near us agreed with my observation that Inverness is not for the down and out. 

They said it’s even pricing itself out of the middle class.

A touch of Italy

Marina has an odd Italian curiosity that makes her try pizza in every country we visit. Just outside downtown on a hill lined with cozy restaurants, we found Little Italy. It was small and quaint and dark, really more romantic than most restaurants back in Rome.

She marveled at the margherita pizza with fresh tomato sauce and basil. It wasn’t the frozen, canned crap she gets around the world. 

The owner is Andrea Montanaro, a 35-year-old who came to Inverness on holiday in 2014 from his native Brindisi where he had a seafood restaurant. He went to work in his cousin’s restaurant, met an Inverness woman, married her and stayed. He bought the restaurant in October 2024.

I asked him what he thinks of Inverness.

“The city is really, really good,” he said. “It’s really nice. People are really lovely. But weather is not nice. It’s raining all the time.”

A company supplies him with natural ingredients from Italy but he also follows the 21st century UK pub trend of using ingredients from the country’s rich farmland. 

“It’s really nice land,” he said. “It’s very natural. There are a lot of things to do. Fishing. Hunting. I like a lot of this kind of stuff. My passion has always been food. Here it’s really good quality of food.”

Since Brexit and the UK bolted the European Union in 2016, staffing has become an issue. Immigrants need passports and that’s not always easy. But it doesn’t rain all the time. 

It was sunny all day when we visited.

If you’re thinking of going …

How to get there: Try flying into Edinburgh. Trains from London are expensive. They range from €134-€205 one way. New York, Washington, Boston and Chicago all fly to Edinburgh direct. For the Caledonian Sleeper, book well ahead. Again, I paid €163 for two round-trip tickets from Edinburgh to Inverness.

Where to stay: Wimberley House Hotel, 1 Wimberley Way, 44-146-322-4430, https://www.wimberleyhouse.com/en, junemackey392@gmail.com. Four-star guesthouse with nice rooms across street from Inverness Golf Club. I paid €151 for one night. No breakfast.

Where to eat: Little Italy, 8 Stephens St., 44-146-371-2963, https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61568848798682&mibextid=wwXIfr, noon-9 p.m. Monday-Saturday. Tired of British fare? This is a good alternative with classic Italian dishes and some gourmet. I paid €71 for two, including wine.

When to go: Average temperatures in summer range from 52-66 and in winter 34-45. It rains about every third day all year round.

For more information: VisitScotland, 36 High St., 44-146-325-2401,autentico.prima@gmail.com, inverness@visitscotland.com, 9:30 a-m-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday.

(Next: The isle of Skye.)