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Telegraph

The world's greatest countries for rail travel, ranked and rated

Is there anything more exciting than stepping onto a train? The moment when you have one foot on a platform and the other on the ledge in the train door is a huge thrill. When the journey that awaits is a long one, the excitement is immense. Add in a sleeper, a reservation or two at the buffet car, perhaps a good friend (though a solo trip can be amazing), a little luxury and a good book, and you have the makings of a dream holiday. The getting there is transformed into the high point of the adventure – pure travel, perfect travel. Railways changed the world. They built cities. They opened up landscapes. They created new relationships, economic, amorous, political. In the world's richest and largest nations – which feature in our ranking below – they have played a seminal role in industry and development, and remain important workhorses in national and international freight. For travellers, they provide access to deserts, mountain ranges, lakelands, canyons – and offer the opportunity to visit without getting off, without hiking or biking. Slow travel is all the rage. Green travel is in vogue. Safety is valued more highly than ever. Rail ticks all the boxes. For our ranking, which is a top ten plus some also-rans (or used-to-runs, and might-run-soons), we chose the largest passenger networks. Some countries have shifted towards a tourist-based model, meaning luxury trains, exclusivity, poor frequency. Others continue to invite foreign guests to ride alongside local travellers, workers and commuters – an authentic and democratic experience. The railways were the greatest travel invention of the past. They could yet be the most promising mode of transport in the future – and there's never been a better time to plan a holiday aboard one. 10. Canada Canada's almost 27,000 miles of railway lie, like its towns and cities, in the less gelid southern lands bordering the US. There's a basic linearity to the main VIA Rail lines, with the main east-west axis connecting Halifax, Quebec City, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Vancouver. There are two romantic flights northward to Prince Rupert and Churchill and a lonely 67.5 miles of isolated and ultra-scenic rail track on the tourist-focused White Pass and Yukon Route linking Skagway (Alaska) to Carcross (Yukon). The flagship service is The Canadian, from Toronto to Vancouver – but it only runs once or twice a week, depending on the season. The economy class ticket starts at £377, which isn't bad for a four-night, 2,775-mile journey, though a numb bum is highly likely even in roomy seats. Prestige Class sleeper cabins on the VIA services are classy, with oversized windows and private bathrooms with showers – but they sell out quickly, no doubt group-scooped by tour firms. The compact Sleeper Plus couchettes, costing three times economy, are a fair compromise. Canada's landscapes are among the most jaw-dropping on the planet. Rail is king for mega-countries and trains are designed to give travellers panoramic hits as the mountains and forests come up to the track and the Northern Lights fill the skies. Canada gets 'punished' in our ranking for coverage, as it can't run trains to places where hardly anyone lives – but it also falls down on punctuality and relatively inflated ticket prices. 9. Spain AVE trains – capable of more than 190 mph – link Madrid to Barcelona, Malaga, Granada, Seville, Alicante, Murcia, Valencia and Ourense in Galicia. In this large country with its capital bang in the middle, high-speed rail has been transformative. On board, the trains are plasticky and soulless, and WiFi is patchy and diesel-speed. You get a sense of Spain's scale, agriculture and general contours from an AVE, but slower services are recommended if you want to take in the landscapes of Asturias or Extremadura. State-owned operator Renfe runs the luxury Transcantábrico metre-gauge line between Bilbao and Ferrol, but there are ordinary public services along much of the route. Pricing in Spain is dynamic and last-minute tickets are usually expensive. Avlo's low-cost, high-speed services were introduced in 2018 and you can get a Madrid-Barcelona one-way ticket for around €7 (£5.80). The purple-liveried trains have only tourist class seats, no quiet car and don't allow pets. 8. United States As with cowboys, cartoons and cars, we feel we know the American railroads even if we've never ridden on them. Whether it's Woody Guthrie and Dylan hopping on to a freight train, or film scenes shot in Grand Central Station, the US loves to export its transport culture. But this is, above all, a driving and flying nation, and the long distances have turned Amtrak and the two smaller passenger rail firms (Alaska Railroad and Brightline) into a long-distance option mainly for the time-rich – ie. the retired, tourists, arty types who like Patricia Highsmith, and rail enthusiasts (also known as 'railfans'). With 140,000 miles, the US has the largest rail network in the world, but it is 100,000 miles shorter than at its 1917 peak, when 1,500 lines operated around 254,000 miles and employed 1.8 million people. Seventy per cent of services run on freight-owned tracks. Its track miles per square miles isn't as high as you might expect as it is a huge country and Alaska, which occupies around a fifth of the continental landmass, has a paltry 506 miles of railway line. Amtrak has great names for its long-distance trains: California Zephyr, Downeaster, Empire Builder, Silver Meteor. The Texas Eagle (Chicago-San Antonio) connects with the Sunset Limited (New Orleans to Los Angeles) to create a 2,728 through-train of sorts. A few stations – mainly called Union – are iconic and handsome, but San Francisco has no central Amtrak station (big trains terminate at Emeryville), and Manhattan's Penn Station, beneath Madison Square Garden – said to be the busiest passenger transit hub in the Western hemisphere – is a chaotic mess. 7. Poland Polish provincial stations have an olden-days quality. Slow express trains operate between city termini, and there are no high-speed lines whatsoever. Warsaw Central could have been the cover of Bowie's Low album. Somehow, the railways – freighted with history – open up the soul of Poland. Trains go in all directions from Warsaw to the edges of the nation, including county-crossing night trains between Kolobrzeg and Krakow and Swinoujscie and Przemysl Glowny (with connections to Kyiv). EuroNight's recently launched Warsaw-Munich sleeper connects the Polish capital with Krakow, Salzburg, Vienna and Munich – with sections for Prague and Budapest. Day trains run between all cities and towns. In May 2023, PKP announced Poland's first train featuring panoramic windows, connecting Przemysl with the Austrian city of Graz. Lithuania, way too small for this survey, has the most expensive rail services in Europe. Next comes: Poland. Why? The operator blames high electricity prices, inflation and interest rates. 6. Japan Even more than the nickname 'bullet train' (dangan ressha in Japanese), the shape of the first Shinkansen high-speed trains – launched in 1964 – was a superlative PR coup. Nothing says future, efficiency, promise and power, like a sleek javelin of a train that everyone can see shooting across their homeland, via fields, past villages, into cities. Japan has twice as many stations per head of population as the UK. Trains are generally modern, clean, punctual and safe. For travellers, the speed can be a bit too jet-like as awesome mountains and rich agricultural landscapes flit by – a blip in the general blur. Tokyo to Aomori in the north, the longest single journey, is only 419 miles (three hours on a Hayabusa train, the fastest service in Japan), but the 33.5-mile Seikan Tunnel – the world's longest undersea tunnel – permits onward travel to Hokkaido. By 2030, a direct line should run up to the city of Sapporo, linking it to Tokyo in less than four hours. The bullets have made sleeper services obsolete, but the Sunrise Express still runs between Tokyo and Okayama, splitting to service two separate branches, and stopping at Osaka on the return leg. The network stretches across the four main islands, with lots of fast and local services branching high-speed off the Shinkansen system. Japan's long, skinny shape lends itself to great rail coverage. 5. Italy Likewise long and narrow, with major urban centres spaced well apart, Italy is also ideal for train travel. Regular, generally punctual Frecciarossa ('red arrow') trains, capable of 300km/h (186mph) connect Venice, Milan, Naples, Bolzano and Genoa along the main ultra-high-speed west coast route. An ordinary high-speed line runs down the opposite coast. East-west connections tend to be slower and it's still quite an odyssey to go all the way to the toe of the boot and cross over to Sicily. The fastest journey from Milan to Palermo – which involves changing at Rome and/or Naples – takes upwards of 15 hours, with ferries conveying through-trains over the Straits of Messina. By the end of 2026, Frecciarossa trains will link Italy with Germany, though the current Munich-Verona-Bologna service (5.5 hours) is lovely precisely because it doesn't go too fast through Upper Bavaria, the Tyrol and Alto Adige. There are Nightjet sleepers between Munich and both Rome and La Spezia and from Stuttgart to Venice and also from Vienna to all three Italian cities. Milan is one of Europe's grandest railway palaces and there are many other imposing stations the length and breadth of this railway superpower. 4. Germany The opening of Berlin Hbf in 2006 was a powerful symbol of German reunification. The impressive glass prism thrills to the constant passage of trains headed to the rest of the country and to Europe. Germany has eight of Europe's 20 busiest stations (the UK has five) – but the German stations serve seven different cities while all the British ones are in London. A lot of journeys across Germany involve flat fields and grey skies, but the old, slow-paced Cologne-Mainz line along the left bank of the Rhine has great mountain and lake views – and some trains have panoramic windows. With just 62.5 per cent of long-distance trains reaching their destination on time (i.e. less than six minutes late) in 2024, the myth of German efficiency has imploded. But regional trains fared better (90.3 per cent were punctual). Germany has the biggest rail network in Europe and its ICE trains are among the most dashing of the high-speeders. Its impressive stations reflect how important trains are to the putative 'heart of Europe'; Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, the largest station in Europe, is where the Saxon and Prussian railways met and is a symbol of the city's – and the nation's – engineering prowess and pride. After its amazing €9 public transport giveaway of 2022, Germany has now committed long-term to the Deutschlandticket: a €58 (£48) monthly pass to use on regional trains as well as buses. 3. France The arrival of the swaggering orange TGV in 1981 confirmed French railways as the new standard for Europe. Gare du Nord is Europe's busiest railway station and Paris is a major hub for onward travel to Germany, Spain and Italy. Night trains out of Gare d'Austerlitz connect the capital to Nice, Lourdes, Narbonne and, in summer, Hendaye (for San Sebastián). In December 2023, Austrian operator ÖBB started a Nightjet sleeper service between Paris and Berlin. Ten lost Intercités de Nuit routes are due to be relaunched by 2030 by the environmentally minded French ministry. Ouigo, France's low-cost option – launched a decade ago – is the model other networks copy. Beautiful stations, some delectable dining options – as on the TGV Lyria Franco-Swiss routes – and frequent, punctual services mean holidaying on French rail is a joy. One dark spot: some of the slower rolling stock is UK-provincial-style awful, even in picturesque regions like the Côte d'Azur. 2. China Twenty-first century China is all about speed, work, busyness, productivity. In a couple of decades the country has opened more than 28,000 miles of high-speed line, and the network is expected to reach around 44,000 miles by 2035. More than three quarters of Chinese cities with a population of 500,000 or more have access to a high-speed rail link. With maximum speeds of 217mph on many lines, intercity travel has been transformed and the dominance of airlines has been seriously challenged on some routes. The map of Chinese railway lines is alluring, though the bulk of routes, and urban centres, is heavily weighted to the east and south east. Major no-change services link Beijing and Shanghai to Xi'an (site of the Terracotta Army), Harbin in Manchuria (known for its ice festival), Hong Kong West Kowloon, Lhasa in Tibet and Urumqi, as well as a host of international services into neighbouring countries, including North Korea – though many cross-border routes were cut back or completely stopped after the pandemic. Backpackers use the 'hard sleepers' but, given the panoply of classes and services, it's worth consulting with a tour firm before booking. There are more than 1.4 billion Chinese and rail travel, especially at holiday times, can be noisy and uncomfortable. 1. India People on the tops of carriages. Commuters rotating like vertical sardines to eject the fortunate alighter. Beggars and the dirt-poor sleeping and toileting on the tracks. Queues a mile long and queue-jumpers employed by the wealthy. Indian railways have a mixed image internationally, though recent years have seen modernisation, improved punctuality and cleaner loos and other facilities. The lines, which cover more than 42,000 miles, are well distributed over the country and the most positive aspect of rail travel in India is that ordinary people do it. The long services are not for tourists, and there's a convivial atmosphere as people chat and share food as they travel. Families with children, senior citizens, pilgrims and business people share the same spaces. So-called express trains in India travel at anything from 35mph to 99mph. There are no high-speed routes. The current longest service (2,581 miles) is a Vivek Express (named after a swami or religious teacher) linking Assam in the northeast with Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south. More than 13,000 passenger trains operate daily to 7,000 stations. All the great sights and landscapes of India can be visited by train and some routes – such as the narrow-gauge Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, the Goa Express, and the Deccan Odyssey luxury service – slice through wonderful landscapes. Increasingly, monied tourists are drawn to exclusive private trains, but these have to give way to the busy public expresses and not everyone enjoys fillet steak and burgundy while gawping at the needy and prayerful.