Qualla: Lochaber Narrow Gauge Railway

Lochaber Narrow Gauge Railway: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Biggin, CC BY-SA 2.0. Drive the A82 north from Glen Coe today and you will pass under a steel railway bridge that no train has crossed since 1977. Look up. That bridge is one of the last visible fragments of what was once a 19-mile industrial railway that climbed from Fort William deep into the wilderness above Loch Treig, hauling men and materials to twenty-three separate tunnel faces hidden in the hills. They called it the Old Puggy Line. It existed for one reason: to drill a 15-mile water tunnel through solid rock so that water from Loch Treig could fall onto turbines at the British Aluminium smelter at Fort William. The aluminium produced went on to skin Spitfires in World War II. The railway that made it possible was an engineering improvisation of remarkable ambition, mostly forgotten, mostly gone, but its trace is still readable on the hillside if you know where to look.

Image: Paul Biggin | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lochaber Narrow Gauge Railway: Aluminium and the Hall-Héroult Problem

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pic:Sourav Niyogi, (WT-en) P.K.Niyogi at English Wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. Aluminium does not come out of the ground as metal. It comes as bauxite, a clay-like ore whose properties were first understood in 1821. To produce the silver-white metal, you first refine bauxite into alumina by the Bayer process, then reduce alumina to aluminium by the Hall-Hér...

Image: Pic:Sourav Niyogi, (WT-en) P.K.Niyogi at English Wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lochaber Narrow Gauge Railway: The Brushwood Track

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stuart Yeates from Oxford, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. Construction of stage one began in the mid-1920s. The route ran from a new pier on Loch Linnhe up to the valve shafts at Loch Treig, climbing from 35 feet of altitude to over 800 feet in places. There was no road. There had to be a railway. The consulting engineers, Meik and Halc...

Image: Stuart Yeates from Oxford, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lochaber Narrow Gauge Railway: Twenty-Three Faces

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doug Lee, CC BY-SA 2.0. The genius of the railway was that it let the tunnellers work the 15-mile bore from twenty-three different faces simultaneously. The main tunnel ran from Loch Treig to the smelter. The railway connected base camp to three intermediate shafts, seven adits, and the valve shafts at ...

Image: Doug Lee | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lochaber Narrow Gauge Railway: The Pier and the Closure

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sourav Niyogi at Wikitravel / User: (WT-shared) P.K.Niyogi at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. Stage one was completed in five years at a cost of £3 million, an enormous sum in the mid-1920s. The permanent pier at the mouth of the River Lochy was finished by the end of 1926, half a mile long, with a three-foot gauge railway running 1.75 miles from the pier through Inverloc...

Image: Sourav Niyogi at Wikitravel / User: (WT-shared) P.K.Niyogi at wts wikivoyage | Public domain