I NOTE your report on the planned restoration of the Ballater railway station waiting room (“Funding to restore blaze-hit royal waiting room”, The Herald, December 9). We were advised that the waiting room had once been visited by Queen Victoria and a Russian tsar. The station had also been visited surreptitiously by Mrs Wallis Simpson in September 1936 where she had been met by King Edward VIII.

He was supposed at the time of meeting her to have been formally opening a new hospital in Aberdeen. To perform the task he had been committed to carry out, he sent along his brother, the Duke of York and his wife, later, of course, to become George VI and Queen Elizabeth. This behaviour of the then King, when it became known, did him no credit.

Ian W Thomson,

38 Kirkintilloch Road, Lenzie.