The Most Beautiful Heritage Railways in the World

12 places in 9 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Albula Railway

   Albulabahn

   Switzerland46.409° N 10.020° E

   

   The Albula line is where Swiss railway engineering turned into landscape art. Linking Thusis with St. Moritz across the canton of Graubünden, the 61.7 km metre-gauge railway was begun in September 1898, opened in July 1903 and extended to St. Moritz a year later. To carry trains from the valley of the Albula to the Engadine without rack assistance, its builders designed 55 bridges and 39 tunnels, keeping the gradient to a maximum of 3.5 percent. In 2008 it was inscribed together with the Bernina line as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Rhaetian Railway in the Albula/Bernina landscapes.

   Did you know? In October 2022 the line hosted a world record: a passenger train of 100 cars, about 1.9 km long, formed from 25 Capricorn units.

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2. 02 Semmering railway

   Semmeringbahn

   Austria · 36.8 km from Wiener Neustadt47.643° N 15.831° E

   

   The Semmering railway climbs over an Alpine pass on a line laid out more than 170 years ago, curling along cliff ledges and crossing gorges on tiers of stone arches. Opened in the 1850s, it was the first mountain railway in Europe built to standard gauge, and it proved that ordinary trains could cross high ground at a time when many engineers doubted it.

   Did you know? The line winds for about 41 km, yet its two ends lie only about 21 km apart in a straight line, and almost half of its length runs in curves.

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3. 03 Kalka–Shimla Railway

   India · 0.8 km from Shimla31.105° N 77.173° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Kalka–Shimla Railway climbs from the plains of northern India to Shimla, the summer capital of British India, on a narrow track just 762 millimetres wide. In 96 km it rises from 656 metres at Kalka to 2,075 metres at Shimla, winding through the foothills of the Himalayas along a route with over 900 curves, more than 100 tunnels and hundreds of bridges. The trains are slow — an average of 25–30 km/h on a ruling gradient of about 3 per cent — and that is part of the pleasure: hills, villages and deep valleys pass at an unhurried speed.

   Did you know? Construction started on an even narrower two-foot track, but in 1901 the contract was revised and the line was rebuilt to a gauge of two feet six inches.

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4. 04 Furka Cogwheel Steam Railway

   Dampfbahn Furka-Bergstrecke

   Switzerland · 38.6 km from Sarnen46.561° N 8.362° E

   

   For more than half a century the trains of the Furka line climbed over the Alps instead of under them, and today steam engines do so again. The Furka mountain section runs about 18 km from Realp in the canton of Uri, over the watershed and down to Gletsch and Oberwald in the upper Rhône valley in Valais. Its highest station, Furka, sits at 2,160 metres, making it one of the highest rail crossings in Europe, and the route alternates between ordinary adhesion track and Abt rack sections as steep as about 11 per cent, with a 1,874-metre summit tunnel beneath the pass.

   Did you know? At nearly 18 km it is the longest railway line in Switzerland operated without electrification.

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5. 05 Flåm Line

   Norway60.863° N 7.115° E

   

   The Flåm Line is a short railway with an outsized landscape. In just 20.2 km it drops 866 m, from Myrdal station high on the mountain plateau to the village of Flåm at the head of the Aurlandsfjord, an arm of the Sognefjord, making it one of the steepest standard-gauge railways anywhere: for most of the way the gradient is 5.5 percent. To manage that descent the builders threaded the line through 20 tunnels, and laid curves as tight as 130 m in radius. Construction began in 1924 and the line opened to trains in 1940, with regular passenger service from February 1941; electric operation followed in 1944.

   Did you know? Only two of the line's 20 tunnels were dug with machines; the other 18 were cut by hand, at 116 to 180 man-hours for every metre.

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6. 06 Darjeeling Himalayan Railway

   India · 37.1 km from Ilam27.045° N 88.267° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, often called the Toy Train, climbs about 88 km from New Jalpaiguri on the plains of West Bengal to the hill town of Darjeeling, rising from roughly 100 metres to about 2,200 metres above sea level on a track only two feet wide. Built between 1879 and 1881, it follows the course of the old Hill Cart Road, the route of the horse-drawn tongas it replaced, and above Kurseong it squeezes through a busy shopping street.

   Did you know? When it was inscribed in 1999, it became only the second railway on the World Heritage List, after Austria's Semmering Railway.

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7. 07 Ffestiniog Railway

   United Kingdom52.924° N 4.127° W

   

   The Ffestiniog Railway was built to let gravity do the work. Authorised by an act of Parliament in 1832 and opened in 1836, the line was laid on a steady downhill grade from the slate quarries of Blaenau Ffestiniog to the harbour at Porthmadog, so that loaded wagons could roll the whole way to the sea with brakesmen riding on them, while horses hauled the empties back up and rode down in wagons of their own. To keep that even gradient the engineers followed the contours of the mountainside, carrying the track on dry-stone embankments and through rock cuttings that are still in use. The company that runs it is the oldest surviving railway company in the world.

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8. 08 White Pass and Yukon Route

   Canada59.625° N 135.138° W

   

   The White Pass and Yukon Route was built in a hurry for gold and has outlived the rush by more than a century. When the Klondike stampede began in 1897, prospectors landing at Skagway in Alaska faced a brutal climb over the Coast Mountains to reach the Yukon headwaters. Construction of a narrow-gauge railway over the White Pass began in May 1898, the summit was reached in February 1899, and the ceremonial golden spike was driven on 29 July 1900, completing a line of about 110 miles to Whitehorse in 26 months. From tidewater the track gains almost 3,000 feet in about 20 miles, on grades of up to 3.9 percent, clinging to ledges cut into granite with the help of some 450 tons of explosives.

   Did you know? On 21 July 1898 an excursion train carried passengers four miles out of Skagway, the first train ever to run in Alaska.

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9. 09 Šargan Eight

   Шарганска осмица

   Serbia43.800° N 19.522° E

   

   The Šargan Eight is a narrow-gauge mountain railway in western Serbia that solves a steep climb with a single stroke of engineering wit: instead of tunnelling straight through the Šargan pass, the line loops over itself in the shape of a figure eight. Between Mokra Gora and the station of Šargan Vitasi it covers about 15.5 km while climbing some 300 metres, passing through 22 tunnels — the longest over 1.6 km — and over five larger bridges, so that from the carriage windows you see the track you have just travelled lying below, and then above, you.

   Did you know? In 1916 a blast in the Budim tunnel brought down its ceiling, killing between 150 and 200 Russian and Italian prisoners of war who were building the line.

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10. 10 Bernina railway line

    Berninabahn

    Switzerland46.409° N 10.020° E

    

    The Bernina line is the railway that proves a train can climb like a mountain road. Running 60.7 km from St. Moritz in the Engadine to Tirano in Italy's Valtellina, it crosses the Alps over the Bernina Pass without a single rack section, relying on adhesion alone on gradients of up to 7 percent, among the steepest of any conventional railway in the world. Opened in stages from 1908 and completed in July 1910, it runs on metre gauge with 1,000-volt overhead wires, operated by the Rhaetian Railway. In 2008 it was inscribed together with the Albula line as the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Rhaetian Railway in the Albula/Bernina landscapes.

    Did you know? In October 2011 the Bernina line became the first railway in the world to be photographed for Google Street View.

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11. 11 Tren a las Nubes

    Argentina · 0.9 km from Salta24.777° S 65.411° W

    

    The Tren a las Nubes, the "Train to the Clouds", runs over one of the highest railways in the world, on the old C-14 branch of the Belgrano network that climbs from the valley of Salta up to the high Puna. Work began in 1921 under the American engineer Richard Maury, who spent the rest of his life in Salta and has a station named after him; the viaduct that is now the journey's goal was finished in 1932, and the complete line was inaugurated in 1948. To win height on the steep slopes Maury used spirals and zigzags, in which the train runs forward, stops and reverses up the next leg, and the line as a whole counts 29 bridges, 21 tunnels, 13 viaducts, two spirals and two zigzags.

    Did you know? The line climbs to about 4,220 metres using only spirals and zigzags, with no rack-and-pinion section anywhere on the route.

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12. 12 Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad

    United States · 2.6 km from Durango37.297° N 107.871° W

    

    Few railways in the world still do the job they were built for with the same kind of machines. The line from Durango up to Silverton was laid by the Denver and Rio Grande in 1881–82 to haul silver and gold ore out of the San Juan Mountains, and trains have run over it ever since. The track is three-foot narrow gauge, a choice that let engineers bend the rails around tight curves in a canyon where a standard-gauge line would have been ruinously expensive. Coal-smoke and whistle echoes aside, much of what you ride in is genuinely old: the coaches and locomotives include rolling stock going back to the 1880s, and the steam fleet is headed by the big K-36 and K-37 engines built for the Rio Grande's mountain lines.

    Did you know? A passenger train called The Silverton was launched by the Rio Grande on 24 June 1947, turning a dying ore branch into a summer tourist line.

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