For the young wizards who had already gotten their Apparition licenses, not many of them actually liked traveling by Floo Powder.
Harry climbed out of the fireplace, patted the soot off himself, cleaned his glasses, then put them back on his nose and looked around. This was a place he knew very well. He saw the familiar black lake, and beyond it, the towering castle standing on the high slope on the far shore, its windows glittering beneath the starry sky. Harry knew he had arrived at Hogwarts Station, where the train used to stop.
As with the Barbican at the castle gate just now, many fireplaces had been installed at this remodeled old platform as well. The familiar surroundings of Hogwarts brought these students a sense of safety, but after they had spent a moment taking it all in, the young wizards whose families had no new homes at Hogwarts looked at the Black Lake and the clusters of buildings rising in the distance around it, and that sense of strangeness came sweeping back—Hogwarts was no longer that isolated school cut off from the world.
On what had once been the open ground beside the platform stood a cluster of buildings, with many structures resembling dry docks and large wharves built there—the reason they were only "resembling" them was that they had not been constructed by the Black Lake like the boathouse at Hogwarts, but directly on land.
"They built another pitch next to the Quidditch Pitch?" a young wizard cried out in surprise. Everyone looked in the direction he was pointing and found that, beside the Hogwarts Quidditch Pitch in the distance, another similar structure had been built. By the moonlight after the rain, the young wizards could make it out clearly, but the difference was that it