Suddenly wilderness is all the rage. Last week's TV was awash with gorgeous helicopter shots of sun rising or mist swirling over some remote corner of Britain. Griff's doing Mountain, Trevor and friends have Britain's Favourite View, Nicholas Crane is puffing up and down on his Great British Journeys, and Wainwright Walks is into season two. Once Friday night on BBC1 would have meant Blankety Blank. Last week, the 9pm slot was a documentary on rock climbing routes in Snowdonia. And there's nothing Griff and Nick and their beaming Gore-tex'd chums like more than to wonder breathlessly that 'on our crowded little island' there still exist such beautiful, wild pockets of silence and emptiness.
Corrour has all that in spades. It is Britain's most remote railway station, half way across the vast, desolate expanse of Rannoch Moor, 1,300ft up in the Scottish Highlands. The nearest road is 10 miles away as the crow flies. The lonely platform rests on a 50 square mile plateau of peat bogs and rocks, bordered on all sides by forbidding peaks. The environment is so inhospitable that even the railway hasn't stamped man's authority on the landscape with any kind of permanence - the boggy land sucked up all conventional foundations, so engineers laid thousands of bundles of brushwood on which the single line sort of floats. This, then, really is the antithesis of cramped, rushed urban living. Except that it is actually pretty convenient to get to.
This is thanks to the Caledonian Sleeper, which travels all the way from London Euston to Fort William, tip-toeing slowly over the brushwood on its way. So if you live in London, Watford, Preston or Crewe, or anywhere within spitting distance thereof, you can spend all week at work, building up steam watching mountain porn on TV - then on Friday you can travel up overnight on the train and find yourself deposited at 8.56am slap bang in the middle of nowhere.
You then have two full days of walking in arguably the country's most dramatic mountains, before catching the sleeper back on Sunday night and going straight into the office to start bragging. It's the perfect weekend for our times - a huge dose of invigorating wilderness and not an hour off work.
At 8pm I spot my pals Sam and Reg on the concourse at Euston. It's not hard - everyone else is rushing home in a suit, they are wearing walking boots, bright woolly socks and rucksacks. It may not be the Orient Express, but a sense of more luxurious bygone days still clings to the sleeper. We are welcomed on board by our carriage's uniformed steward, Kate, who explains that dinner will be served in the lounge car, warns we may feel a bump when the locomotive changes, and asks what time we would like to be woken for breakfast in bed.
It's a bit like a mobile Scottish embassy too. The cabins come with tartan blankets, Highland mineral water and packets of shortbread. All the chatty staff are from north of the border. Down in the dining car, everyone's eating haggis, neeps and tatties, followed - as we pull through Hertfordshire - by a selection of Scottish cheeses, all washed down with Deuchars IPA and various whiskies.
Standard-class cabins have a window, basin, and two bunks. First-class is the same, but each passenger has their own cabin and one bunk is folded away. It's very comfortable but I find it hard to sleep. Auden's famous 'Night Mail' was on this same stretch of track, but what he should have written is: this is the Night Mail crossing the, squeal, border, bringing the cheque and, thump, thump, the postal order, letter for the rich, letters for the BANG - that'll be the new loco.
Then suddenly we are on the platform, blinking in the bright light. We can't help but stand and watch, slightly bereft, as the train that's been our cosy home for nearly 12 hours chuffs off into the distance. It starts to rain.
The plan is to walk 16 miles through the mountains then drop down to Kinlochleven, on a sea loch to the west. We splosh across the moor and skirt the black waters of Loch Treig. With no roads along its banks, the silent lake feels secret and eerie, and a single boarded-up house at the loch end adds to the spooky air. A dead sheep lies in the garden.
We quickly move on, following the river to Meanach Bothy, a bare stone hut left open for walkers to bed down in. As we eat our prawn sandwiches from the M&S on Euston station, windows occasionally open in the thick cloud revealing shocking glimpses of the cliffs and arretes of the Nevis range high above. Inside there's a book for hikers to record when they passed, useful if someone later gets lost. This may be pristine wilderness, hours' walk from anywhere, but some things don't change - the last entry, drawn in blue biro, is a massive cock.
We don't pass a road or another person all day, and to add to our sense of exploration, even the map starts to get vague. The footbridge marked outside the bothy doesn't exist so we have to strip off and ford the icy river, before climbing Sgurr Eilde Mor (alt. 3,312ft), then descending with aching knees all the way to Kinlochleven (alt. 0ft), where we check into the Macdonald Hotel.
The morning brings a long grind back up into the Mamores range, urged on by groups of stags which silhouette themselves on the misty ridgeline above. We climb four peaks, teeter over 'Devil's ridge', then drop down into Glen Nevis and hitch the final few miles into Fort William in time for the 7pm train home.
Kate, our steward, is there to welcome us back on, and we settle into the lounge car for celebratory haggis and ale as the Highlands slide past our window in the silvery evening light.
Essentials
For ticket prices and times call 08457 550033 or see www.firstscotrail.com. Advanced purchase returns from London to Corrour or Fort William cost £112. A few 'bargain berth' tickets are also available from £19 each way.
