ULTIMATE Rail Journeys: how trains connected the world

Britain’s gift to the world: Rocket and the Flying Scotsman

The railway was born among the coal mines of north-east England. On 27 September 1825, the Stockton & Darlington Railway became the first public railway to use steam locomotives, with George Stephenson’s Locomotion No. 1 at the head of the first train. The gauge Stephenson chose, four feet eight and a half inches, became the standard gauge that most of the world’s railways still run on.

Four years later came the moment that settled the future. In October 1829, the directors of the new Liverpool & Manchester Railway held a competition at Rainhill, near Liverpool, to find the best locomotive for their line. Five machines entered, and only one completed the trials: Rocket, built in Newcastle by Robert Stephenson and Company. Its many-tubed boiler and blast pipe made it faster and more reliable than its rivals, and almost every steam locomotive that followed used the same ideas.

When the Liverpool & Manchester opened on 15 September 1830, it was the first railway to link two cities with timetabled passenger trains, all hauled by steam. Within a lifetime, rails crossed continents.

A century on, Britain built the most famous locomotive of all. Flying Scotsman, designed by Nigel Gresley and built at Doncaster in 1923 for the London and North Eastern Railway, hauled the non-stop express from London King’s Cross to Edinburgh from 1928. On 30 November 1934 it became the first steam locomotive officially recorded at 100 mph. Its stablemate Mallard went faster still, reaching 126 mph on 3 July 1938, a record for steam that has never been broken. Flying Scotsman now belongs to the National Railway Museum in York and still runs on special trips.

From steam to electric, diesel and high speed

The electric railway made its debut at the Berlin trade exhibition of 1879, where Werner von Siemens ran a little electric train around the grounds. Over the next century, electric and diesel locomotives slowly replaced steam, which disappeared from most main lines in Europe by the 1970s, and lives on today with the heritage railways and their devoted volunteers.

Then came speed. On 1 October 1964, nine days before the Tokyo Olympics, Japan opened the Tōkaidō Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka: the first high-speed railway, with trains running at 210 km/h. The “bullet train” is still famous for its punctuality and its safety, and the view of Mount Fuji from the window on a clear day is one of the great sights of rail travel. France followed in 1981 with the TGV between Paris and Lyon, and on 3 April 2007 a specially prepared TGV set the world speed record for a train on rails: 574.8 km/h.

Today high-speed lines run across Europe and Asia; China alone has built the largest network in the world. Night trains are returning to Europe’s timetables, hydrogen trains have carried passengers in Germany since 2018, and new lines are under construction from Japan to the Balkans, where the rebuilt railway between Belgrade and Budapest is about to join two capitals in around three hours.

The Belgrade–Budapest train: our guide →

The Orient Express

No train has a story quite like it. The Belgian entrepreneur Georges Nagelmackers founded the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits to run luxurious sleeping cars across Europe, and on 4 October 1883 the first Orient Express left Paris for the East. At first the journey to Constantinople ended with a ferry across the Danube and a steamer across the Black Sea; from 1889 the rails ran all the way.

After the First World War, the Simplon-Orient-Express took a more southerly route through the Simplon Tunnel under the Alps, by way of Milan, Venice, Trieste and Zagreb, then through Belgrade and Sofia to Istanbul. It is the train of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934), which is held up by a snowdrift between Vinkovci and Brod, and of countless spies, diplomats and honeymooners. The last through trains between Paris and Istanbul ran in the 1970s.

The legend was revived in 1982 as the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, now run by Belmond, in restored carriages from the 1920s and 1930s: polished marquetry, Lalique glass panels, white-gloved stewards and dinner jackets in the dining car. Its usual route runs between London or Paris and Venice. Once or twice a year it makes the grand journey between Paris and Istanbul by way of Budapest and Bucharest; in 2026 one left Paris on 25 September, and Belmond lists the next for 31 May 2027. Book a long way ahead.

Over the Alps: the great mountain railways

Nowhere did the railway engineers show more daring than in the Alps. These are the journeys enthusiasts come back to again and again; most run all year, and the views change completely between the green of summer and the deep snow of winter.

• Glacier Express: Zermatt to St. Moritz in about eight hours, across 291 bridges and through 91 tunnels, reaching 2,033 metres at the Oberalp Pass. It has run since 1930, and its panoramic carriages make the most of every valley.
• Albula and Bernina lines: the Rhaetian Railway’s two great routes through the Graubünden Alps, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2008. On the Albula line, the six stone arches of the Landwasser Viaduct (1901–1902) rise 65 metres above the river and carry the train straight into a tunnel in the cliff face. The Bernina line climbs from St. Moritz to Ospizio Bernina, 2,253 metres up, the highest point of the network, on gradients of up to 7 per cent without a rack, then spirals down past glaciers and lakes into Italy at Tirano.
• Gornergrat Railway: opened in August 1898, the first electric rack railway in Switzerland climbs from Zermatt to 3,089 metres, face to face with the Matterhorn.
• Jungfrau Railway: completed in 1912, it tunnels through the Eiger and the Mönch to the Jungfraujoch, at 3,454 metres the highest railway station in Europe.
• Semmering Railway: built between 1848 and 1854 to the designs of Carl von Ghega, the line over the Semmering Pass south of Vienna was one of the first true mountain railways, with viaducts and tunnels through a romantic landscape of villas and forest. A UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1998.
• Bavarian Zugspitze Railway: since 8 July 1930 this rack railway has climbed from Garmisch-Partenkirchen to the Zugspitzplatt glacier at 2,588 metres, just below the summit of Germany’s highest mountain.
• Closer to Belgrade: in western Serbia, the narrow-gauge Šargan Eight at Mokra Gora loops through tunnels and over bridges in a figure of eight to climb the mountain.

Trains on film and on stage

The cinema and the railway grew up together. One of the very first films, the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, shown in 1896, is simply a train pulling into a station, and legend says the first audiences ducked. Ever since, trains have given film-makers speed, suspense and romance in a confined space.

A few favourites. In Buster Keaton’s The General (1926), a silent comedy, a locomotive is the star. In Brief Encounter (1945), a love story unfolds at a railway station, filmed at Carnforth in Lancashire, where the restored station now has a heritage centre. Alfred Hitchcock sent Cary Grant west on the Twentieth Century Limited in North by Northwest (1959). Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Kenneth Branagh’s (2017) both filled the famous train with stars.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), John Hughes’s Thanksgiving comedy with Steve Martin and John Candy, is a road-and-rail odyssey loved by every traveller who has ever missed a connection. The Polar Express (2004), Robert Zemeckis’s film of Chris Van Allsburg’s picture book, with Tom Hanks, has become a Christmas tradition. Unstoppable (2010), Tony Scott’s last film, sends Denzel Washington and Chris Pine after a runaway freight train; it was inspired by a real incident in Ohio in May 2001, when a CSX freight train ran for some 66 miles with no one at the controls before a crew caught it and brought it to a stop. Bullet Train (2022), with Brad Pitt, is a riotous action comedy aboard a Shinkansen, based on a novel by Kōtarō Isaka. And for a generation, the Hogwarts Express crossing the Glenfinnan Viaduct in the Harry Potter films made the West Highland Line famous; in summer, the Jacobite steam train follows the same route from Fort William to Mallaig.

On stage, nothing beats Starlight Express, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of racing trains, with the cast on roller skates. It opened at the Apollo Victoria in London in 1984 and ran for 18 years; in Bochum, in Germany, it has played since 1988 in a theatre built for it, and in 2024 it returned to London.

Trains on Film: Doctor Zhivago and the great railway films →

Farewells and romance: the railway of the heart

For generations, the railway station was where life’s great partings and reunions took place. In both world wars, troop trains carried young soldiers away from towns and cities across Europe, and the platform was the last place many families saw them. Sweethearts, mothers and children waved until the train had gone, not knowing whether the men they loved would come home, or come home unchanged in body and mind. It is a sad image, and somehow a romantic one: the long goodbye as the carriages fade into the distance, the scenery flashing past the window, and the steady, comforting rhythm of the wheels on the rails, like music beneath the words no one could say. At London Victoria, a plaque by platform 8 marks where the Unknown Warrior arrived home in November 1920.

Film-makers understood this better than anyone. In Brief Encounter, the station is where love begins and where it ends, to Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto and the roar of the express through Milford Junction.

And the railway could be romantic in lighter ways too. From 1933 an all-Pullman electric train ran between London Victoria and Brighton in about an hour, and from 1934 it was called the Brighton Belle: brown-and-cream cars, table lamps, and kippers at breakfast, much loved by the actors and theatre people who lived by the sea. It made its last run on 30 April 1972, and some of its cars survive in private hands.

Thomas, Hornby and Märklin: why children love trains

Ask almost any small child to draw a train and they will. Trains are big but friendly, they have faces (or seem to), they follow rules you can see, and they always arrive somewhere. A clockwork engine on a circle of track is a whole world a child can control.

The most famous engine of all began as a bedtime story. In the 1940s, the Reverend Wilbert Awdry, a clergyman and railway enthusiast, told stories to his young son Christopher about engines with feelings. The first book of The Railway Series came out in 1945, and Thomas the Tank Engine had his own book in 1946. Awdry was also a volunteer on the Talyllyn Railway in Wales, which inspired some of his stories. Thomas reached television in 1984 and has since travelled the world.

Model railways turned the love of trains into a lifelong hobby. Märklin, founded in Göppingen in 1859, introduced standard track gauges for toy trains in 1891. In Britain, Frank Hornby, the inventor of Meccano, launched his clockwork trains in 1920, and Hornby is still the name every British enthusiast knows. Sweden’s Brio has made its wooden railways since 1958, the first train set for millions of children.

The railway in literature

Writers have loved the train as much as film-makers: a stage on which strangers meet, a clock that ticks towards an ending.

Charles Dickens survived the Staplehurst rail crash of 1865 and wrote one of the great ghost stories, The Signal-Man, the following year. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878) begins and ends at the railway; Tolstoy himself died at the little station of Astapovo in 1910. Émile Zola’s La Bête humaine (1890) is a dark novel of drivers and engines. E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children (1906) is the gentlest of family stories, set beside a line in Yorkshire in the 1970 film.

Then the golden age: Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train (1932) and Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Ian Fleming’s From Russia, with Love (1957), with James Bond on the same train, and Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (1950), which Hitchcock filmed. Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) took the train journey into travel writing, and Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train (2015) brought it to a new generation. For poetry, read W. H. Auden’s Night Mail, written for the 1936 documentary of the same name, and Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop, a single summer afternoon at a country station.

The trains we must remember

The railway also served the darkest crime of the twentieth century. During the Second World War, Nazi Germany used the trains of the Deutsche Reichsbahn to deport millions of people across occupied Europe to ghettos, concentration camps and the killing centres of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełżec. Most were Jews; among the victims were also Roma and Sinti, and many others persecuted by the regime. They travelled for days in crowded freight wagons, often without food or water.

Budapest remembers one of the last and largest of these deportations: between mid-May and early July 1944, around 440,000 Jews were deported from Hungary, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In Budapest, the Holocaust Memorial Center and the Shoes on the Danube Bank keep their memory.

Places to remember them: the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum at Oświęcim in southern Poland, where the railway track still leads through the gatehouse of Birkenau (book your visit in advance on the Memorial’s official site; most visitors come from Kraków, which a future ULTIMATE Poland guide will cover); the Gleis 17 memorial at Berlin-Grunewald station, where steel plates along the platform record each transport; and, in London, Frank Meisler’s sculpture outside Liverpool Street station for the Kindertransport, which brought some 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, to safety in Britain in 1938 and 1939. Auschwitz was liberated on 27 January 1945, now International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum →   United States Holocaust Memorial Museum →   Yad Vashem →

Rail journeys across the ULTIMATE guides

Each of these pieces tells the railway story of one guide’s city or country, with its own photos and practical advice. More will follow as our guides grow.

• Belgrade and Budapest: the new high-speed railway along the Danube, with onward trains to Vienna, Munich and the Alps
• London: Rocket’s heirs, King’s Cross and the Flying Scotsman, St Pancras and the Eurostar, the world’s first underground railway
• Mumbai: the first train in India, Bombay to Thane in 1853, and the Gothic splendour of the CSMT
• Sri Lanka: the hill-country railway from Kandy to Ella and the Nine Arch Bridge
• Shanghai: the Maglev and China’s high-speed railways
• Singapore: Tanjong Pagar, the Rail Corridor and the new RTS Link to Johor Bahru
• America (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas): the transcontinental railroad of 1869, the California Zephyr and the Coast Starlight
• Hong Kong: the Peak Tram, Asia’s first funicular, climbing since 1888, and the clock tower of the old Kowloon–Canton Railway
• Tuscany: the Treno Natura through the Crete Senesi, and Florence’s modernist station of Santa Maria Novella
• The French Riviera: the Blue Train of the Belle Époque, the little Train des Pignes to Digne and the reopened line to Tende
• The Alps (Ski Resorts): ski by train to Zermatt, Wengen, St Moritz and St Anton

Belgrade–Budapest by train →   London: King’s Cross, St Pancras and the Flying Scotsman →   Mumbai: India’s first train and the CSMT →   Sri Lanka: Kandy to Ella and the Nine Arch Bridge →   Shanghai: the Maglev and China’s high-speed railways →   Singapore: Tanjong Pagar, the Rail Corridor and the RTS Link →   USA: the transcontinental railroad, the California Zephyr and the Coast Starlight →   Hong Kong: the Peak Tram and the Kowloon–Canton Railway clock tower →   Tuscany: the Treno Natura and Florence’s railway age →   The French Riviera: the Blue Train, the Train des Pignes and the Tende line →   The Alps: ski by train to Zermatt, Wengen, St Moritz and St Anton →

Our advice

Take the train at least once on every trip, even for a single hour: it is the best way to see how a country lives. Book the famous scenic journeys (the Glacier Express, the Orient Express, Kandy to Ella) as early as you can, sit on the side of the view, and pack a picnic for the long ones. And keep a notebook: on a train, the stories come to you.

Over to you. What was your first train journey, and which one would you take again tomorrow? Tell us below or in our forum: we read every message, and the best tips find their way into the guides.

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