What was the name of the train journey during which J.K. Rowling first conceived Harry Potter?

J.K. Rowling first conceived Harry Potter during a train journey from Manchester to London.

Rowling has described the idea arriving in 1990 while she was travelling on a delayed train. The image of a boy who did not know he was a wizard came to her, and she began mentally developing characters and the structure of the story. The journey became one of the most frequently repeated origin stories of the Harry Potter series.

The first novel was not published immediately. Rowling spent years planning and writing, experienced personal upheaval, and eventually completed the manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Bloomsbury published it in 1997, seven years after the train journey.

The route is sometimes misremembered as a trip between London and Edinburgh because Edinburgh became an important part of Rowling’s life and writing history. The commonly cited conception journey, however, was from Manchester to London.