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'The Hogwarts Express, a gleaming scarlet steam engine, was already there, clouds of steam billowing from it, through which the many Hogwarts students and parents on the platform appeared like dark ghosts."
Sure enough, swirling steam from the massive red locomotive is enveloping the waiting passengers in a scene from every cinematic and literary archetype. That boy with the red hair running excitedly down the platform must be Ron Weasley, Harry Potter's best friend. Will there be witches selling cauldron cakes on board?
In fact, there is fine china and best bacon, being ferried solicitously to the star author. The interior has the rich elegance of another age, a cocoon of dark, lovingly varnished wood, an enclosed and magical world in which to speak about an enclosed and magical world. Outside, clouds of steam billow across sodden wheat fields. Inside, JK Rowling talks of trains, the painful pressures of fame and the world's best-known boy wizard, bar none.
The luxuriously beautiful replica of the train is merely an author promotional tour, albeit more imaginative than most. The train may be the most visible part of the publicity machine, but Harry Potter fever has been cunningly fanned over the past few weeks. A series of strategies, including an over elaborate veil of secrecy and a refusal to release copies of the book to the media and book shops in advance, has cranked up expectation to new highs. In truth young readers would surely seize the books in their hundreds of thousands anyway; but playground word-of-mouth is no longer deemed enough to sell that most marketable of commodities, a new Harry Potter book.
When Rowling finally did alight at Edinburgh's Waverley Station last night, like her fictional hero, she did an impressive vanishing act. The author disappeared from the sight of hundreds of eager young fans when she neatly slipped out of one of the back carriages of the Hogwarts Express and into a waiting gold Mercedes. Once again, her publicity machine had done its job, while the author remained as elusive as ever. However, there is an appropriateness to the setting. Young Harry, now on his fourth, largest and most dangerous adventure to date, came into being on a railway.
"Harry Potter was conceived on...