Europe's best train routes, from scenic to spectacular

Europe built its railways through mountains, along fjords, and across borders that now announce themselves as a change of language outside the window rather than a passport check. That history explains why rail travel on the continent still repays the hours it takes. Flying removes the landscape entirely. Driving hands it to one person and takes it from everyone else in the car. A train gives the view to every passenger at once, for hours at a stretch.

The best train journeys in Europe share a few traits. They stack sharp changes of terrain into a short distance. They rely on engineering that had to solve a real problem. That might be a gradient too steep for conventional track, a bog that would not hold a foundation, or a valley too wide to cross in a straight line. And they are old enough that the stations, viaducts, and villages along the way carry their own history.

The seven routes below run through Norway, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Scotland, and northern England. Some last barely an hour. Others fill most of a day. Mountain and plateau sections look entirely different in February and July, so timing shapes the trip as much as the route does.

The ranking runs from strong contenders to the single journey that best combines scenery, access, and the experience of riding a train for its own sake. Fares and booking rules change often, so they are left out here. Every route runs on a published timetable and can be booked through the relevant national operator. Rail passes such as Interrail and Eurail apply on several of them, though some panoramic services require a seat reservation on top of the ticket.

Any ranking like this involves judgment. A slow descent beside a Norwegian fjord and a crossing of a high Swiss pass resist direct comparison. The order below answers one question applied consistently. How much does each journey depend on the train itself, rather than on the place it happens to reach?

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The Settle to Carlisle line runs 73 miles across the Yorkshire Dales and the Pennines, linking the market town of Settle to the border city of Carlisle. It earns seventh place for sustained upland scenery and Victorian engineering, held there because its character is pastoral rather than vertical.

The Midland Railway built the route in the 1870s, late enough in the railway age that it stands as one of the last major British lines cut largely by hand. Crews worked with picks, shovels and black powder rather than machinery. Enough navvies and family members died during construction that the church at Chapel-le-Dale carries a memorial to them.

That labor is visible from the carriage window. Trains cross the Ribblehead Viaduct, a limestone and brick structure of 24 arches that carries the track over open moorland below Whernside. Minutes later they enter Blea Moor Tunnel, which runs for more than a mile under the Pennines and was excavated with the help of ventilation shafts sunk from the moor above.

The line exists today because passengers fought for it. British Rail proposed closure in the 1980s, pointing to thin traffic and the cost of repairing Ribblehead. Local campaigners, rail user groups and heritage bodies pushed back, and the government reversed the decision in 1989.

It operates as an ordinary scheduled service, not a tourist excursion. There is no commentary, no observation deck and no premium carriage — only a regular train through some of the emptiest country in England, with stone villages, sheep pasture and dale sides opening between the cuttings.

Most services work the line as part of the Leeds to Carlisle route, which takes a little under three hours end to end. Several stations are request stops, among them Dent, the highest mainline station in England at 1,150 feet above sea level.

Spring and early autumn suit the trip, when the moorland color turns and low cloud is less likely to sit across the tops for the whole run.

Illustration: Quartz

The West Highland Line runs from Glasgow north to Fort William and on to Mallaig on Scotland's west coast, covering roughly 164 miles. It ranks sixth for the range of landscape it crosses in a single trip: sea lochs, open moorland, mountains and a working fishing harbor facing the Hebrides.

Rannoch Moor was the hardest section to build, a waterlogged expanse of peat bog with no road nearby. The ground would not hold a conventional foundation, so the builders floated the trackbed on a mattress of brushwood, earth and ash. Trains still cross it that way. For several minutes the view in every direction is bog, water and distant hills.

Corrour, on the same stretch, is the highest railway station in the U.K. and has no public road access. Walkers and climbers use it as a trailhead.

Further north the line crosses the Glenfinnan Viaduct, completed in 1901 and curving across the head of Loch Shiel on 21 arches. Most passengers recognize it from the Harry Potter films. Its real distinction is structural. The viaduct was built from mass concrete rather than stone, at a point when that material was still untested in large railway structures, and it has carried traffic ever since.

The final stretch from Fort William to Mallaig follows the coast, with views toward the Isle of Skye and the Small Isles in clear weather. This section is known as the Road to the Isles. Mallaig remains a working fishing port, and ferries for Skye and the Hebrides leave from beside the station.

A seasonal steam service, the Jacobite, runs between Fort William and Mallaig during the warmer months. The regular ScotRail train covers the identical track year-round on a standard fare. The full run from Glasgow takes about five hours, and the most dramatic scenery sits in the final two. Winter trips are quieter, though low cloud can hide the moor and the coastline entirely.

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The Semmering Railway climbs about 1,640 feet across roughly 25 miles of the Eastern Alps between Gloggnitz and Mürzzuschlag in Austria, and it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1998. Completed in 1854, it is generally regarded as the first mountain railway in Europe built to standard gauge.

The engineering is the draw. Carl Ritter von Ghega laid out a route that needed 16 viaducts and more than a dozen tunnels to carry trains across ground earlier surveyors had dismissed as unworkable for rail. Its best-known structure is the Kalte Rinne Viaduct, a two-tiered stone arcade curving across a steep valley on piers of local stone. Passengers can see several of the viaducts from the train itself, because the line doubles back on its own alignment as it gains height.

The route was laid out before long tunnels through hard Alpine rock became routine, so it traces the contours of the hillsides instead of cutting through them. For a passenger that means sustained views of forested ridges and bare rock faces rather than long stretches of darkness. The gradient stays gentle enough that ordinary scheduled trains work the line without rack assistance.

Gloggnitz to Mürzzuschlag takes a little over an hour, short enough to fold into a longer trip between Vienna and Graz rather than build a separate excursion around it. The summit station at Semmering sits at roughly 2,900 feet, and the line crosses the pass through a tunnel just under a mile long. Austrian Federal Railways runs regular services over the route, so no tourist carriage or special ticket is involved — a standard seat on a scheduled train covers it.

Semmering and the other villages along the way grew into resort destinations in the late 19th century because the railway reached them, pulling Viennese travelers into the mountains in numbers for the first time. Several of the large hotels from that period still stand above the tracks. A base tunnel is under construction beneath the pass, and once it opens, fast Vienna to Graz traffic will bypass the 1854 alignment.

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The Flåm Railway descends about 2,800 feet over 12.6 miles between Myrdal and Flåm in western Norway, which makes it one of the steepest standard-gauge lines in the world. The run takes roughly an hour and carries passengers from bare mountain plateau down to a fjord-side valley floor.

The line opened in 1940 after about two decades of work, with much of the tunneling drilled by hand through hard rock. Trains pass through 20 tunnels on the way down, including spiral sections bored inside the mountain so the track can double back on itself and shed height. The service also makes a scheduled stop at the Kjosfossen waterfall, where passengers step out onto a platform beside the falls for a few minutes.

Flåm sits at the head of the Aurlandsfjord, a narrow arm of the Sognefjord, Norway's longest fjord. That location explains why the railway exists: it linked the fjord community to the Bergen Railway at Myrdal, high on the plateau above. The line still serves residents alongside visitors, many of whom arrive by cruise ship at the Flåm quay or by connecting train from Bergen or Oslo.

The steepness forces a slow speed, which gives passengers a long look at the valley walls, the river below, and the farms set on the slopes. The rolling stock carries five separate braking systems, a requirement dictated by the gradient.

Most travelers combine the railway with something at the bottom. A fjord cruise runs from Flåm along the Aurlandsfjord toward Gudvangen, and the Aurlandsfjellet mountain road crosses the high ground above the village, open in summer only.

Summer brings the heaviest demand, with cruise arrivals and tour groups filling the carriages. May and September deliver the same descent with fewer people on board, and late-spring snowmelt on the plateau keeps the waterfalls running high.

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The Bernina Express runs between Chur in Switzerland and Tirano in Italy, crossing the Bernina Pass at more than 7,000 feet. It does so without a base tunnel through the main Alpine ridge. That makes it the highest Alpine crossing worked by ordinary wheel-on-rail adhesion, with no rack or cog assistance on the climb.

The line belongs to the Rhaetian Railway, the meter-gauge network of the canton of Graubünden. UNESCO lists the Albula and Bernina lines together as a World Heritage Site. The listing recognizes how the route was threaded through the terrain rather than blasted straight through it.

Two structures define the ride. The Landwasser Viaduct, on the Albula section near Filisur, curves across a gorge on tall stone piers. At the far end it feeds straight into a tunnel mouth cut in the rock face, with no approach embankment at all. Further south, the Brusio circular viaduct carries the track around a full open-air spiral, letting the train shed height gradually on the steep drop toward Tirano.

The full run covers roughly 90 miles and takes about four hours. Within that stretch the climate changes completely. The high sections pass glaciers, bare rock and alpine lakes near Ospizio Bernina, the summit station and the highest point on the route. The descent then drops into the Italian-speaking Val Poschiavo and ends among the terraced vineyards of the Valtellina.

The service runs year-round rather than as a summer-only excursion. Winter brings snow-packed passes and frozen lakes above the tree line. Summer opens up green valleys and wildflowers on the lower slopes, and longer daylight covers more of the route.

Panoramic cars with extended windows run on the scheduled Bernina Express service. Seats in them require a reservation on top of a ticket or rail pass, including for Interrail and Eurail holders. Travelers $TRV who skip the reservation can still ride the same tracks on regular Rhaetian Railway regional trains, which stop more often and cost less.

Demand concentrates in July and August and around major holidays. Booking several weeks ahead is sensible in those periods.

Illustration: Quartz

The Glacier Express links Zermatt and St. Moritz across roughly 180 miles of Swiss Alps in about eight hours, crossing 291 bridges and passing through 91 tunnels. It ranks second because no other route in Europe holds mountain scenery at this scale for this long.

The train is marketed as the slowest express train in the world, and the phrase describes the premise accurately. The draw is duration rather than pace — eight hours in which the window rarely shows anything but high alpine terrain. The service dates to 1930 and now runs in winter as well as summer, on the meter-gauge tracks of the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn and the Rhaetian Railway.

The summit of the route is the Oberalp Pass at nearly 6,700 feet, where the line crosses from canton Uri into Graubünden, close to the headwaters of the Rhine. Further east the train threads the Rhine Gorge, a pale limestone canyon the river cut through debris left by a prehistoric landslide. From there it joins the Albula line, a stretch it shares with the Bernina route.

Rolling stock is designed around the view. Carriages have large curved windows that reach up into the roofline, and seats face tables rather than seatbacks. Meals are served at the seat, so no passenger has to give up a window to reach a dining car.

The endpoints carry weight of their own. Zermatt sits beneath the Matterhorn and bans combustion-engine cars, which makes arriving by rail the normal way in rather than a scenic option. St. Moritz, in the Engadin valley, hosted the Winter Olympics in 1928 and again in 1948.

Seat reservations are compulsory on the Glacier Express, separate from any rail pass, and they sell out during ski season and midsummer. Anyone short on time can book a single leg, such as Chur to Andermatt, and still cover a large share of the strongest scenery on the line.

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Europe's best train journey is a linked route across western Norway rather than one line. It joins the Bergen Railway to the Flåm Railway and is commonly sold as Norway in a Nutshell. It ranks first because a single day of travel delivers high plateau, steep mountain descent and fjord shoreline at sea level.

The Bergen Railway connects Oslo and Bergen across the Hardangervidda, a treeless plateau the track crosses at over 4,000 feet. It is among the highest mainline stretches in Europe. Conditions are harsh enough that parts of the route run under snow sheds, which keep trains moving through winter storms. The view is bare rock, frozen lakes and low scrub, with almost no settlement visible for long periods.

Travelers $TRV leave the mainline at Myrdal, a junction station that exists largely to serve the branch below it. From there the Flåm Railway descends to the head of the Aurlandsfjord. A fjord ferry then runs through the Nærøyfjord to Gudvangen, followed by a bus to Voss and a return to rail for the final stretch into Bergen. The sequence works in either direction and can be started from the coast.

Bergen anchors the western end. Its Hanseatic wharf district, Bryggen, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and its row of wooden commercial buildings fronts the old harbor. The city sits between steep hills and open water. Oslo works as the other end, with frequent connections from elsewhere in Scandinavia.

The full circuit fits into one long day for travelers willing to start early. An overnight stop in Flåm, Voss or Bergen removes the pressure of tight connections. Each leg can also be booked separately through the national rail operator and the ferry and bus services, which gives more control over timing and overnight stops than a packaged itinerary.

Range is what puts this route at the top. Plateau, gorge, fjord and coastal city arrive in sequence on working public transport rather than on a dedicated tourist train.