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The Hogwarts Express has been a rail system for years—four hundred years, or thereabouts—but it wasn't always.
In the early days, it was a rade that would wind through the country. The heads of house would trade off year by year, Salazar now and Helga next.
Nobody recalls who first summoned the creatures, but we know what happened every year.
Each summer the castle doors would blow open, and from the depths of the forest would come a strange, sturdy animal, a little like a goat, head bobbing as it came to the open doors and the Great Hall. It would wait for them there, in the huge open hall: bigger than any goat they'd seen, with ragged, oily coats and long horns and huge cloven hooves. Its eyes burned fiery red, and their breath snorted even in the summer air.
"Hello, old fellow—that time again, is it?" Gryffindor would say cheerfully, every single time.
"Clearly," Salazar would huff, not quite self aware enough to recognise that giving him the same answer every summer was only encouraging him.
One of them would pack their things and mount up, be it Salazar, with a sniff that indicated exactly what he thought about the smell of goat; Helga, with her mighty war hammer hanging down her side; Godric, having always forgotten something in his haste to get going; or Rowena, pulled from her studies with bad grace.
From Hogwarts they set out, winding down the land and back again. The whole green world unfolded beneath those tireless hooves, blurring past in long summer days. Insects crooned in the evening air and birds sung in the mornings, and the rade was a long, charmed march through a welcoming countryside.
More goats with gleaming oily coats and burning eyes fell right in as they went, always the exact number needed—never one more or less. The rade went with the clatter of diamond-hard hooves and picked up magical children as they moved through villages and towns, until there was a procession (of children, some quite stolen) talking and singing and laughing, riding through the country up to Scotland and away.
When the last goat was mounted, weeks after setting out, the whole herd turned back towards the castle and nothing could make them turn away again. They sped across the country in days then, hard cloven hooves loud and sure, to the sound of cries and laughter and the curious, unseasonal screams of geese overhead.
The founders died, eventually, but the goats still came and waited. The professors then were once students, of course, and they knew what to do, come the end of summer.
It wasn't until the 16th century that the practice was stopped: an enterprising headmaster shooed the last goat from the Great Hall—no barnyard animald inside, this was a more civilised age.
It could not be made to leave, no matter what spell or curse was sent its way, but at sunset it left on its own, eyes burning with red fire and hooves loud on the stone floors. It walked back into the forest from which it came.
The goats seemed to disappear entirely then, gone back into the darkness of the sprawling forest outside castle. A cursory walk through the trees would reveal nothing: there were centaurs and unicorns and all manner of magical creatures, but nothing stared out of the shadows between the trees with burning red eyes.
They never walked out of the forest again. Instead, they adapted.
They reappeared in smaller numbers with the first old, creaking tram on long stone rails, which found itself in London. The tracks were built by nobody at all. 'HOGWARTS' was painted on the side of the carriage, and it limped across the countryside, stopping to collect its children as it went.
Nobody tried to stop them again, of course, but nowadays the strange creatures are nowhere to be found at all, anyway. Some magical bestiaries claim they're extinct, or near extinct, and that they only ever lived in what is now the Forbidden Forest.
Either way, the tram cars on their old stone rails disappeared at some point in the eighteen hundreds, and the big scarlet steam train replaced them for good.
Still, Hogwarts Express still runs, year in and year out, with no maintenance and no driver. Every student knows it leaves at 11 o'clock, no later (so they mustn't be late), from platform 9¾ every summer.
But even now, if you peek into the boiler room to see where all that steam comes from, you'll find it burns no fuel. There is only that same old fire, flickering like the slow blink of ancient eyes in the dimness.