All Aboard the Hogwarts Express
No trip to the Warner Bros. Studio Tour would be complete without a visit to Platform 9¾ and the Hogwarts Express. This was definitely one of those parts of the tour where I wanted to stop and take photos of absolutely everything.
The platform itself is beautifully recreated, with its brick walls, old-fashioned station clock, piles of Hogwarts luggage and, of course, the famous luggage trolley disappearing through the wall at Platform 9¾. You can even pose with the trolley yourself and pretend you’re on your way to Hogwarts.
But the real star is obviously the Hogwarts Express.
The enormous scarlet steam train is impossible to miss when you walk onto the platform. The locomotive used for the films was a real British steam engine, GWR 4900 Class 5972 Olton Hall, which was transformed into the Hogwarts Express for the Harry Potter series. Seeing it up close is quite different from seeing it on screen. It’s huge, incredibly detailed and immediately recognisable.
You can also walk through a recreation of the Hogwarts Express carriage and look inside the compartments. They’re filled with little details from the students’ journeys to Hogwarts, including luggage and sweets from the trolley. Looking through the windows, you can also see how the filmmakers created the illusion that the train was travelling through the British countryside.
The train scenes weren’t simply filmed by sending the actors off on a railway journey every time. A carriage interior was constructed at Leavesden Studios, while moving scenery could be added outside the windows during production. It’s another lovely example of how the Studio Tour lets you see the filmmaking tricks behind something that feels completely real when you watch the finished films.
There’s also a lovely bit of Harry Potter history connected to the Hogwarts Express. The train was there at both ends of the filmmaking journey: the station was the setting for one of the earliest scenes filmed for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and it returned for the final scene of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, when an adult Harry, Ron and Hermione send their own children off to Hogwarts.
I think that’s part of what makes seeing the Hogwarts Express so special. For ten years of films, it represented the beginning and end of every Hogwarts year. Harry would leave the ordinary world behind, board the train at Platform 9¾ and head back to the place that really felt like home.
Standing beside it at the Studio Tour, with the Hogwarts Castle sign on the side of the bright red engine, it’s difficult not to feel a tiny bit like you should have brought your own trunk and owl.
Sadly, mine must have been lost somewhere at King’s Cross.
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