Some train journeys are transport. A handful are the reason you booked the holiday. Here are the ones worth building a trip around, and they can all be booked as part of an escorted tour with Great Rail Journeys.
The Glacier Express, Switzerland
Marketed as the slowest express train in the world, which tells you everything about the spirit of it. Zermatt to St Moritz across the spine of the Alps, through nearly a hundred tunnels and over almost three hundred bridges, in carriages with panoramic glazing that curves up into the roof.
It takes around eight hours and nobody sensible complains about that. Switzerland is where Great Rail Journeys are strongest, and the Glacier Express usually appears as one leg of a wider Swiss tour rather than the whole trip — which is the right way round, because the Bernina and the Gornergrat deserve their turn too.
The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express
The restored 1920s and 1930s carriages, the marquetry, the dressing for dinner. This is the one people save for a significant birthday or anniversary, and it is expensive in a way that is not really open to argument.
Booked as part of a tour, it typically forms one spectacular leg with more ordinary — though still very good — travel and hotels around it. That is a considerably more affordable way to do it than a standalone booking, and you still get the night in the cabin.
Japan by Shinkansen
The bullet train is the opposite proposition to the Glacier Express: the point is that it is fast, silent and absurdly punctual. Tokyo to Kyoto in a little over two hours, with Mount Fuji out of the right-hand window if the weather cooperates.
Japan is the country where an escorted tour earns its money hardest. The rail network is superb and almost entirely legible once someone has explained it to you — and having a tour manager do that explaining, rather than working it out on a platform at Shin-Osaka, is the whole value proposition.
The Arctic Circle and the Northern Lights
Rail into Lapland and the Arctic Circle, for the Aurora, husky sledding and the long winter dark. Great Rail Journeys list a nine-day Northern Lights and Lapland tour, which at the time of writing was reduced from £2,999 to £2,849 per person.
Worth knowing: the land-based approach and the cruise approach to the Northern Lights are genuinely different holidays. A ship keeps moving to find clear sky; a land tour puts you further inland where the weather is often more settled and the activities — huskies, snowmobiles, Sami culture — are easier to reach. Neither can promise you a sighting.
India
Indian Railways carries more people than almost any other network on earth, and travelling on it is not a sideshow to seeing the country — it is seeing the country. Fourteen-day tours start from around £2,499 per person, taking in the Golden Triangle and rather more besides.
This is another where being escorted changes the experience substantially, particularly on a first visit.
Canada and the Rockies
Daylight-only travel through the Rockies in a glass-domed carriage, with the mountains, the lakes and a reasonable chance of a bear. The scheduling is deliberate — the train stops overnight so you don’t sleep through the scenery, which is a fairly strong hint about where the value lies.
Picking one
- First rail holiday? Switzerland. Short flights, superb trains, and the scenery does the heavy lifting from day one.
- Travelling solo? Look for the departures with no single supplement before you fall for a specific itinerary.
- Want the big occasion? The Orient Express as one leg of a longer tour.
- Want the country to be the point? Japan or India.
- Prefer a smaller group? The small group tours average about 22 travellers.
Click here to browse Great Rail Journeys tours
Routes, rolling stock and prices change between seasons, and specific trains are not guaranteed on every departure — check the itinerary for the tour you are booking. This page was written in August 2026.
Disclosure: the Great Rail Journeys links on this page are affiliate links. If you book through them I may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. It doesn’t change the price you pay.
