The world’s greatest train journeys, according to 10 of our writers

There may have been a point, somewhere back in the middle of the last century, where the train seemed to have lost the remainder of whatever swagger it once had. The aircraft had entered stage-left as the foremost method of long-distance travel. Humanity’s gaze had turned upwards, to rocket ships and the moon. And, in Britain at least, the diesel that dowdiest of locomotives, had replaced the steam engine, with all its noise and romance.

But the death of the rail journey – if ever it was announced – was somewhat exaggerated.

True, we all have our frustrations with the modern incarnation of train travel; a concept fraught with delays and price hikes, convoluted ticketing and overcrowded carriages. And the less said about the ongoing, slow-motion embarrassment of the HS2 project the better.

But beyond these everyday concerns, there is still something magical about a lengthy ride along the rails. Especially if your trip is one of no particular hurry and you can relish the context – watching unfamiliar places and remarkable scenery unfurl through the window.

Here, 10 of Telegraph Travel’s regular contributors wax lyrical about their favourite rail routes – a collection of anecdotes which takes in not just legendary lines like the Trans-Siberian and the Orient Express, but the engineering marvel of the Eurostar, and the simple home pleasures of the “Heart of Wales” service, from Swansea to Shrewsbury.

You will, no doubt, have your own train touchstone. In which case, add your stories and recollections to the comments box at the bottom of the page. All aboard, doors closing…

1. Washington DC to New York

By Chris Leadbeater

I am always slightly mystified that Americans do not have a greater attachment to the train. Yes, I understand the unfading US love affair with the automobile, the spider-web convenience of the country’s air network – and the tardy, somewhat outdated condition of some of the Amtrak system. But when you have a route that works, it works wonderfully.

I would include “The Acela” in this bracket. That’s the vaguely corporate-speak name given to the Amtrak service between Washington, D.C., and Boston. It’s a seven-hour, 457-mile odyssey (if you ride all the way from terminus to terminus) that, as well as being a crucial passenger service, acts like a greatest hits tour of the key cities of the Northeast.

I caught it for the first time well over a decade ago. I was “only” going from the capital to New York, and intended to have my nose in my laptop for much of my time on board. But instead, I could barely pull my eyes from the window as the train raced along its line – up through Maryland to Baltimore, flirting with the edge of Chesapeake Bay on the way to Wilmington (in Delaware), then the next step, into Pennsylvania, via Philadelphia.

By the time we were cutting through New Jersey, pausing at the platform in Trenton, I was scanning the horizon for signs of Manhattan. That last half-hour, approaching the island, is quite something – the skyscrapers of the Financial District coming into view long before you reach them; before the train takes its dive into the maw of Penn Station.

Subsequently, I have completed the route along the lip of Long Island Sound, through Connecticut and Rhode Island, and on to Boston. But nothing compares to that arrival into the Big Apple – not stuttering in traffic all the way in from JFK, but moving smoothly, sleekly, straight into the heart of the matter and out into the glare and gleam of Midtown.

How to do it

Single fares on the Acela, between Washington DC and New York, start at US$104 (£80). Bon Voyage makes the line the key element of its nine-day “Tale of Three Cities” (Boston, New York, Washington DC) rail holiday. From £2,499 per person (with flights).

2. The Heart of Wales Line

By Sarah Baxter

It’s not the longest train journey – ridden in full, just 120 miles over about four hours. But there’s a magic to it. Boarding in south Wales, popping out in Shropshire, disappearing into wild borderlands in between, it’s a bit Alice in Wonderland, like you’ve gone down a very green rabbit hole.

The rural Heart of Wales Line connects the midst-of-nowhere communities of the Welsh Marches. Well, it does if you ask; many of its lyrical halts – Pontarddulais, Llangadog, Llangammarch, Llangunllo – are request stops, so you must stick out your arm. Along the way, it passes lovely Llandeilo, pointy Sugar Loaf hill, the handsome viaducts of Cynghordy and Knucklas. It’s accompanied by a Heart of Wales Line Trail, which you can use to walk between stations.

Oddly, it’s busiest over winter: Welsh pensioners can ride for free from October to late March. So they do. My off-season journey was packed with over-65s out for the day, tables filled with nibbles and wine. Take your own. Raise a glass to Welsh wonderland.

How to do it

A one-/two-day Heart of Wales Line Circular Ranger Ticket, valid for hop-on, hop-off travel along the line, costs £45/£65.

3. Buenos Aires to Esquel

By Chris Moss

Argentina once had one of the largest railway networks on the planet. Today it has hardly any long-distance services. I caught the system in its death knell in the 1990s and rode on all the mainline spurs out of Buenos Aires, before then-President Menem closed it all down. Every trip was epic, but the three-day ride down to Patagonia was the longest and most entertaining.

I travelled with an old friend, Mike, and we shared a couchette with four local lads of a similar age; all of us were in our late twenties and early thirties. We drank Quilmes beer and cheap wine and chatted in Spanglish as the train – pulled and pushed by old diesel engines – chugged slowly across the deep-green Pampas. Day drifted into night. Hangovers and northern Patagonia began the second day. We had left the cattle behind and now saw rheas skipping across the dry steppe.

At Ingeniero Jacobacci we changed to board the wooden-seated Trochita, also known as the Old Patagonian Express. Another day and night passed and we hung out with our new friends and boiled up water to share matés and pastries bought at stations. Where did the vendors come from? It was all desert out there. The sky was immense. Time had ceased to matter. I never wanted to arrive.

How to do it

Rail South America’s three-week Patagonia Rail and Cruise itinerary (Mar 7-29, 2025) includes a journey on the Trochita. From $14,950 per person.

4. An Indian throwback

By Gill Charlton

Travelling through India by slow train in the 1980s, I would sit on the stoop by the open carriage door and let the passing landscape flood my senses. As modern trains and new rails increased speeds, such pleasures vanished. A rare exception is found in a rural corner of Rajasthan north of Udaipur.

Leaving from tiny Khambli Ghat station near Deoghar at 11am (Indian stretchable time), a 1930s train still creeps along a metre-gauge railway that hugs a vertigo-inducing escarpment deep in the Aravalli hills. It’s a magnificent ride of several hours across 172 bridges and through tunnels that are feats of engineering dating back a century.

There’s great bonhomie on the train as locals use it to go to the temple, to the shops and to reach the main line at Marwar Junction.

How to do it

Book through family-run Dev Shree, which will send you with a guide so you can chat with locals. The six-room guesthouse is a member of Relais & Châteaux and does things beautifully. Doubles from £300.

5. The sleeper train to the Alps

By Adrian Bridge

Thinking about it, the most memorable train journey for me bore an uncanny resemblance to the classic London to Venice route courtesy of the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express. It was my first holiday without my parents: a school ski trip to Austria. I was 10. We travelled from London to Dover by train, crossed by ferry to Calais and then boarded the sleeper service that would speed us through France through the night, provide mesmerising views of Alpine peaks in the morning and deposit us in Innsbruck in good time to hit the slopes that day.

What an adventure, what excitement – and how wonderful to be able to sleep on a bunk bed in a six-berth couchette thrilling to the sound of chugging and hooting and the immeasurably comforting sense of motion. I laughed with friends, we ran up and down the carriages, stopping only to stare open-eyed at the panoramas of Europe and the new worlds that were suddenly opening up to us.

How to do it

For a modern take, hop on the Eurostar train from London to Brussels and from there the new European Sleeper Brussels-Venice service, alighting in Innsbruck.

6. The Transcantábrico

By Annie Bennett

Sitting in a plush armchair, sipping a glass of albariño, I was mesmerised by the cliffs and coves on the crinkly coastline as we chugged gently along the narrow-gauge tracks that stretch across northern Spain. I was on the Transcantábrico, the sumptuous vintage train that trundles from Ferrol in Galicia through the regions of Asturias and Cantabria to Bilbao in the Basque Country.

The journey only covers around 400 miles but takes a week with quite a variety of experiences along the way, from Romanesque churches to seafood extravaganzas and the gleaming Guggenheim museum. I can still taste the rich fabada butter bean stew that was served from silver tureens as we headed through Asturias. Memories of clumsy salsa dancing, clutching a cocktail on the tiny dance floor in the bar car, are mercifully hazy.

How to do it

A nine-night trip with Kirker Holidays, including a week on the Transcantábrico with all meals, excursions, flights and a night each at the parador in Santiago de Compostela and the María Cristina hotel in San Sebastián, costs from £10,898 per person. Inntravel can organise trips along chunks of the narrow-gauge railway on local trains. A seven-night journey through Asturias costs from £770 per person with B&B at characterful hotels. Book flights separately.

7. The Trans-Siberian Express

By Gavin Haines

The train journey to end all train journeys. Hell of a commitment, the Trans-Siberian. Almost 6,000 miles over eight days (if you don’t get off), much of it spent watching bleakly beautiful landscapes roll by. That’s a lot of time to contemplate life.

It was all white when we went. Who does the Trans-Siberian mid-winter?

This was 2011, before Russia went full pariah. We – my then-girlfriend and I – were skint and young, so travelled third class, or platzkart; a rolling dorm, essentially, with fold-down beds.

Russians can take a while to warm to strangers, but are generous when they let you in. Vodka, cigarettes and dried fish were shared liberally with us. The prim female carriage attendants – or provodnitsas – ruled assertively but softened. A rotating cast of characters came and went. Students, soldiers, lawyers, grandmothers. But no tourists, not in winter.

Few spoke English, but we played long card games together, shared laughs. Fags were smoked in the freezing no-man’s land between carriages, where the snow snuck in through cracks. Trips to the dining cart were events. Every dish was smothered in dill, a herb that always takes me to Russia.

We stopped along the way, in frigid Tomsk, Irkutsk and Listvyanka, where locals drive over Lake Baikal. We didn’t go all the way to Vladivostok, peeling off instead for the Trans-Mongolian to Ulaanbaatar then Beijing. After the Trans-Siberian, life looked a little different.

The Government advises against all travel to Russia.

8. The Bernina Express

By Anthony Lambert

The highest open-air rail crossing of the Alps promises much and it doesn’t disappoint. The route of the narrow-gauge Bernina Express is one of only three railway World Heritage Sites for the way astonishing engineering is woven into majestic landscapes. The curving Landwasser Viaduct is one of the most photographed structures in Switzerland, its southern end resting against a vertical wall of rock as the railway burrows into the valley side.

Leaving Bergün the train winds up four spirals, five tunnels and leaps over seven viaducts in a spaghetti-like tangle of rails as it climbs to a summit tunnel. South of St Moritz the railway reaches its highest point of 2,257m (7,405ft) above sea level amongst wild mountains before plunging into Val Poschiavo by track so sinuous and disorienting that from the back of the train you can sometimes see the front travelling in the opposite direction. These delights are enjoyed from panoramic coaches with glass roofs to reveal the numerous mountain peaks.

How to do it

Second-class tickets cost around £60. Great Rail Journeys’ Mountaintops of Switzerland escorted tour includes the Bernina Express; from £3,499 per person.

9. The Eurostar to Paris

By Nick Trend

Way back in the late Eighties and early Nineties, I used to go to Paris by train quite a lot. It was quite a schlepp but much cheaper than flying. The boat train used to leave Victoria at about 8pm or 9pm and rattle down to Dover Western Docks in about two hours. You would then move to a grotty Sealink Ferry before finally boarding a slow SNCF service which brought you, groggy and sleepless, into the Gare du Nord at about 6am.

So when I took one of the first Eurostar trains to leave London for Paris in November 1994, it was a revelation. For the first time, you could make a seamless rail journey from the heart of London to the heart of Paris and it took just three hours. The whole experience seemed incredibly glamorous.

Where it began at Waterloo had been transformed from a grimy commuter station into a sleek international terminal and compared with the old InterCity 125 – the nearest thing Britain then had to a high-speed train – the silver-yellow, bullet-nosed Eurostar looked like a technological marvel. You even got a meal and glass of champagne in your seat – unthinkable on British Rail.

I specifically remember the excitement of the moment when the doors hissed shut. This was the most momentous event in the history of cross-Channel travel since Blériot wobbled his way over the White Cliffs in 1909. Of course, there was still an embarrassing contrast between the British and the French experience. With no high-speed line this side of the Channel, we rumbled slowly through the south London suburbs and Kent countryside. But when we powered out of the tunnel and onto the French TGV lines, we knew we were entering a new era. And for me, the excitement of getting from London to Paris without even seeing the sea has never faded.

How to do it

Eurostar fares from London to Paris start from £39.

10. The Orient Express

By Sarah Marshall

Dragging a tatty suitcase with a chunky word processor balanced on top, I turned up in Venice 27 years ago to study part of my degree. I’d arrived on a clunking sleeper train from Rome. Sat cross-legged on the floor of an overcrowded carriage eating tuna from a tin, I’d vowed to one day return to La Serenissima in style.

Years later, I booked a birthday trip for my mum on the Orient Express. Travelling from Paris to Venice, the museum on wheels revels in glamour and luxury – with a gourmet car serving food far more refined than preserved fish in brine.

Beyond Paris, the scenery started to get interesting as we trundled past silky blue lakes and snow-smothered Alpine peaks. But the views inside captivated me most – from the detailed marquetry in our entry-level, bunk-bed cabin to the Art Deco glass windows of the Lalique-designed restaurant car. Grand piano recitals and white-gloved butler service were frivolously fabulous – not to mention the parade of sparkling evening gowns. In comparison, when we finally reached our destination, Italy’s bejewelled showpiece city seemed rather dull.

How to do it

A full-board overnight trip on the Venice Simplon Orient Express starts from £4,275pp in an historic cabin, including Eurostar service from London to Paris.