The 10 Most Scenic Train Journeys in The World

Billed as the world's slowest express train, the Glacier Express takes almost eight hours to cross the Swiss Alps between Zermatt and St Moritz, crossing 291 bridges and 91 tunnels while never exceeding 45 km/h, deliberately slow enough for the panoramic windows to take in the full scale of the Alps.

The curved Landwasser Viaduct is the journey's single most famous moment.

A UNESCO World Heritage rail line, the Bernina Express climbs from Chur in Switzerland over the Bernina Pass into Tirano, Italy, crossing the open-air Brusio spiral viaduct, a corkscrewing loop of stone arches built to gain altitude without a tunnel, and passing directly beside the glaciers of the Bernina massif at over 2,200m.

Restored 1920s and 1930s carriages, all inlaid wood, brass fittings and Art Deco marquetry, carry passengers between London, Paris and Venice aboard the most famous luxury train in the world, evoking the golden age of rail travel that inspired Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express.

Formal dinner is required most evenings aboard.

One of the steepest standard-gauge railways in the world, the Flam Railway climbs 866 metres in just 20km between the fjord-side village of Flam and the mountain station at Myrdal, passing waterfalls and hairpin turns carved through solid rock over 20 years of construction.

It makes a scheduled stop at Kjosfossen waterfall, where passengers step out onto a platform beside the falls.

Voted one of the world's great rail journeys repeatedly by travel publications, the West Highland Line runs from Glasgow to Mallaig across Rannoch Moor's wild bog and past Ben Nevis, Britain's highest peak, before crossing the curved, 21-arch Glenfinnan Viaduct made globally famous by the Harry Potter films' Hogwarts Express.

VIA Rail's transcontinental flagship crosses Canada in four days aboard 1950s stainless-steel dome cars, from Toronto through the Canadian Shield and prairies into the Rockies at Vancouver.

Glass-domed Park cars let passengers watch scenery from above the roofline, and Prestige cabins include their own bathroom and picture windows.

The appeal is less one view than the sheer, unhurried scale of the country passing by.

The world's longest railway line runs just under 9,300km from Moscow to Vladivostok, crossing seven time zones and skirting Lake Baikal, the world's deepest lake, over a journey that can take a full week without stopovers.

Most travellers break the trip into stages, stopping in cities like Irkutsk and Ulan-Ude before rejoining a later train.

Named after the Afghan cameleers who once helped open up Australia's interior, The Ghan runs nearly 3,000km from Darwin to Adelaide through the dead centre of the continent, crossing the red desert around Alice Springs and Uluru's outback region over two to three days.

Off-train excursions into the MacDonnell Ranges and Katherine Gorge break up the journey.

Nicknamed the 'Toy Train' for its narrow two-foot gauge track, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway has climbed into the Himalayan foothills since 1881, its steam locomotives looping through the famous Batasia Loop spiral to gain altitude on impossibly steep terrain.

UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1999 for its engineering.

Nicknamed for the near-vertical rock face it descends, this short but dramatic railway uses a series of switchbacks to drop the train down a mountainside once considered one of the most difficult stretches of track ever built.

Built in the early 1900s to link the Andean highlands to the coast, it's now run as a heritage tourist ride between Alausí and Sibambe, with views down the gorge that made the engineering feat necessary.