London is known for the fact that there's no single station called 'London' - in fact, there are some eleven railway termini whereby London is connected with places throughout the country, even with other countries (Eurostar)! Among them is the widely acknowledged King's Cross (Kings X) station that is responsible for the East Coast Main Line to the cities of York, Newcastle, and as far as Edinburgh, Inverness, and Aberdeen. Although I was tied up with my dissertation in summer, I found a great offer by the train company, Virgin Trains East Coast, between London Kings X and Edinburgh. I took this opportunity to try to go farther north where rails aren't connected - to the farthest northern isles called the Shetland Islands.

The Shetland Islands are located near the border between Britain and Norway. Therefore, they are quite different from mainland Britain in several respects. Moreover, my classmate at UCL worked on a distinctive accent used in the Shetland Islands and often talked about it to me with passion - that's a strong motivation for me to make this extreme journey beyond the railway milestones. In fact, there was a longer journey time than the time I had in the Shetlands. It took me about 14 hours one way, consisting of trains to Aberdeen and the night ferry to Lerwick, whereas I only had 9 hours for sightseeing. I spent most of the three-day trip on some kinds of transportation.



There were several things that I wanted to experience, and actually I did. To begin with, as a train nutter (along with this website's host), I'd been hugely interested in taking a ride on the 10.00 Aberdeen - the Northern Light service, previously known as the Flying Scotsman. I got the first class tickets for return (wow!), where passengers can receive meal and drink service included in the fare, despite a disappointment on the outbound journey - they ran short of the hot cooked English Breakfast which I was looking forward to the most!

Find out what I saw when I arrived