For the last seven years or so, the ailing funicular railway at Cairngorm Mountain has hung around the ski area’s neck like a giant concrete-and-steel albatross. Forced to close in 2018 due to structural issues with the track, it wasn’t able to open to the public again until 2023 – that’s about as long as it took the French to restore Notre-Dame Cathedral after the fire. The repair works were supposed to cost £16.8 million but ended up costing £25 million, and even then the freshly fixed-up funicular only managed to operate for a few months before having to close down again, requiring yet more repairs. Meanwhile Scotland’s four other ski centres, all struggling to make their finances stack up through increasingly erratic snow seasons, looked on in green-eyed wonder at the monumental amounts of government cash being sprayed around on Speyside, like four little urchins in a Dickens novel, their noses pressed to the glass of a well-stocked sweetie shop, its shelves piled high with the kind of treats they could only ever dream of being able to afford. At the end of February this year, with the second round of repairs complete, the funicular was finally able to re-open to the public once again. Any ten year-old kids who might have hoped to use it to get them to ski lessons in the Ptarmigan Bowl back in the winter of 2018 will now be getting ready to leave school in the summer, some of them no doubt heading off to study at universities many miles from Scotland’s mountains, but never mind – in a few years’ time perhaps they’ll return with young families and their kids will get to use it. Or perhaps not. In an article published in the P&J towards the end of last year, John Carson – a retired engineer who had previously worked as chief estimator for Balfour Beatty, the company that carried out the repairs – suggested that the structure was “inherently flawed” and that the remedial works were “like putting lipstick on a pig.” To put it mildly, then, it is uncool to be a fan of the funicular. The most acceptable things to say about it in clued-up company are all negative: that it should never have been built in the first place (the gondola from Glenmore proposed at around the same time would’ve been better, surely?); that, instead of being repaired, it should simply have been removed from the mountainside and replaced by native trees and shrubs (because rewinding is the future); that, thanks to climate change, Scotland’s ski centres will struggle to survive for more than 50 or 60 more years anyway, so what was the point in spending £25 million repairing a ski lift?; that the money would surely have been better spent putting 125-odd extra teachers into Scottish schools for a period of five years. And yet... and yet... in spite of all this, I still have a huge soft spot for the big blue snow train. I know I shouldn’t – I know I should probably be joining in with the outrage party like everyone else – but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Partly, I know, this attachment is irrational – the result of nostalgia born of very specific memories I have of the funicular, like the first time I took my kids on it when they were learning to ski. This was when they were at an age when any kind of train was massively exciting, let alone a train that took you high up onto a mountain and into the snow. How many hundreds of pint-sized skiers and snowboarders, from 2001 to the present, will have made their first few turns in snow-sure snowfields of the Ptarmigan Bowl thanks to the funicular? But there are rational reasons for my funicular-philia too. I’m old enough to be able to remember what a great little ski hill Cairngorm used to be before the funicular broke down. Take it from grandpa, young’uns: on a good snow day, that train allows you to pack in a lot of fast laps in a short space of time. It only takes four minutes to whisk you the 2km up to the top station, rising a bit over 400m in the process. Get yourself back down to the bottom in – for the sake of easy maths, let’s say six minutes – and you can see how it could be used to clock up some decent mileage in just a few hours. Not only is it fast, it can shift a lot of people too – up to 240 per journey – and on busy days capacity counts. Sure, on good snow days I’ve joined queues for the funicular that stretch out of the base station and into the car park, but without the funicular those queues would’ve stretched out of the car park and half-way down the road back to Glenmore. So yes, the return of the funicular after all these years really is something to celebrate, no matter how unfashionable that might be. True, with the benefit of hindsight it might not have been the most cost-effective form of uplift that could have been built back in 2001, but turning the clock back isn’t an option: the fact is that it’s there now, and it’s working. The last few years have been brutal for Cairngorm: first the well-publicised failings of previous operators Natural Retreats, then the loss of the funicular, then the lost revenues of the pandemic and then the lean snow winters of the last couple of years. Perhaps, though, the fixing of the funicular could prove to be an inflection point – the end of a decade of woe and the beginning of something brighter. Here’s hoping. Read more: Scots skiing ace Kirsty Muir eyes 2026 Winter Olympics after claiming first World Cup win