This was the reason we went to Fort William.

My work colleagues had given me a voucher for two tickets on an excursion from Fort William to Mallaig on the Jacobite Steam train run by West Coast Railways. This is the train that features as the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter films.

We hadn’t been on a steam train since we took the boys on the one at Bo’ness in the long ago.

That British Railways logo is a cracker.

It’s reminiscent of the one used for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924-25.

See more images of the Wembley Lion here.

When we debarked at Mallaig Station the footplatemen were hard at work shovelling coal on the Jacobite’s coal tender.

The end of the line at Mallaig:-

Edited 3/10/13:-
The flickr account I previously linked to in this post has disabled the sharing facility. The set of pictures is still viewable on flickr via this link or for each photo click on the relevant links below.

Re-edited 12/12/16. The pictures have become embeddable again so I have done so.

Original post:-
Various memorabilia were made for the Empire Exhibition, Scotland, 1938; a lot of them containing representations of the Tower of Empire.

The Exhibition’s logo though was, like that of the Wembley Empire Exhibition of 1924 and 1925, a lion. The Wembley lion was what is heraldically known as statant. Since in 1938 the Exhibition was being held in Scotland the 1938 lion was of course rampant.

Colour images of the 1938 Exhibition are rare but this was what the Empire Exhibition’s entrance gates looked like – complete with lion logo. (Photos below taken from Flickr – though I’d seen them on display at the last Glasgow Worldcon in 2005. A set of coloured photographs of the Exhibition had come to light a year or so previously after having been in a drawer or something for 60+ years.) As always the Tower of Empire is conspicuous in the background.

And there’s a night time view of the entrance taken from much the same angle.

One of the features of the Exhibition was the coloured lights not only on the buildings but also in the fountains and on the Tower.