Steam still runs into Boat of Garten. The station is Category B listed, and the listing group includes the stationmaster's house, two working signal boxes, the footbridge, and inside the 1922 south box an original thirty-lever McKenzie and Holland locking frame. The building went up in 1863, was rebuilt in 1904, closed in the Beeching cuts of 1965, and reopened in 1978 as a stop on the Strathspey Railway, which runs seasonal steam services up from Aviemore.
Beside the station stands The Boat Country Inn, a four-star hotel with a bar and restaurant, a beer garden and a habit of welcoming dogs. The food is casual and hearty, pub-style: honey-roast ham with tomato and coarse-grain mustard, roast sirloin on warm ciabatta with caramelised onion and gravy, sticky toffee pudding, coconut panna cotta.
For dinner the alternative is Anderson's, an independent restaurant that also fires wood-oven pizza. It cooks Scottish produce in season — blaeberry-cured Loch Duart salmon, pork belly porchetta, grilled mackerel — and puts Nairnshire pork and local black pudding on a pizza called The Black Pig. Much of the menu can be made gluten- or dairy-free, there is a vegan menu, and children can have half portions. "Forget pretence," the restaurant says of itself; "the atmosphere here is relaxed and informal."
The village has its own provisions too. The Post Office doubles as the grocery, selling fresh food, gifts, cards and stationery. There is a café, the Osprey, and the 1896 Gallery, which shows landscape painting and photography alongside artisan craft and jewellery.
The Speyside Way and Sustrans Route 7 meet in the village centre, and from there it is six easy miles of path to Aviemore or five to Nethy Bridge, with a waymarked all-abilities route beginning at the Community Hall. Loch Garten is under three miles away, and this is where the village earns its name as the Osprey Village. The birds returned to breed at the loch in 1954, after the species had vanished as a UK breeding bird, and the place has been the centre of their story since, apart from a pause in nesting between 2016 and 2019. At Milton Loch there is a bird hide and feeding station, and red squirrels come to it.
The name is older than any of the railway or the ospreys. In Gaelic, Coit a' Ghartain means the ferry from the cultivated place, for the boat that once crossed the Spey before there was a bridge. The village grew from a farming clachan into a late-Victorian resort once the station arrived. Before St Columba's church was built, around the turn of the century, services were held in the school and in the railway station's waiting room.
Little of the village strains for attention. The children's play park sits beside the Community Hall. The golf and tennis club plays an eighteen-hole course laid out by James Braid. The Community Garden, planted in 2002 with help from the BBC's Beechgrove Garden, is still kept by local volunteers. Around seven hundred people live here and in the hamlets nearby.
The station has done its share of television — the Dr Finlay remake, Danny MacAskill's Wee Day Out, an episode of Full Steam Ahead. On a quiet afternoon you tend to hear the whistle before you see the smoke rise over the trees.