The Most Beautiful Heritage Railways in Europe
7 places in 5 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful heritage railways in Europe are Albula Railway (Switzerland), Semmering railway (Austria) and Furka Cogwheel Steam Railway (Switzerland). The list covers 7 heritage railways in 5 countries. Switzerland has the most, with 3. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Europe's mountain railways were among the great engineering achievements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To carry trains across the Alps, the Balkans and the Norwegian fjords, engineers invented spiral tunnels, curving viaducts and loops that let a line gain height on its own track, and they did it with a care for the landscape that later earned several of these routes World Heritage status. Today they are travelled as much for the scenery as for transport.
The Semmering railway in Austria, completed in 1854 under Carl von Ghega, was the first railway across a high mountain range in Europe, with viaducts and tunnels threaded through the Semmering pass. In Switzerland, the Albula Railway climbs from Thusis to the Engadine over the Landwasser Viaduct and through a sequence of spiral tunnels, while the Bernina line continues over the Bernina Pass, the highest rail crossing of the Alps, before descending to Italy on the spiral viaduct at Brusio. Together they are a World Heritage Site.
Other lines owe their survival to enthusiasts. The Furka Cogwheel Steam Railway runs steam trains over the old Furka line near the Rhône Glacier, a route abandoned when a base tunnel opened and later restored by volunteers. In Serbia, the Šargan Eight loops a narrow-gauge line in a figure of eight across a mountainside near Mokra Gora. And in Norway, the Flåm Line descends from the mountain station of Myrdal to the Aurlandsfjord, one of the steepest standard-gauge railways in the world, passing the Kjosfossen waterfall.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Albula Railway | Heritage railway | Switzerland | |
| 2 | Semmering railway | Heritage railway | Austria | |
| 3 | Furka Cogwheel Steam Railway | Heritage railway | Switzerland | |
| 4 | Flåm Line | Heritage railway | Norway | |
| 5 | Ffestiniog Railway | Heritage railway | United Kingdom | |
| 6 | Šargan Eight | Heritage railway | Serbia | |
| 7 | Bernina railway line | Heritage railway | Switzerland |
01 Albula Railway
Albulabahn
Switzerland46.409° N 10.020° E
Daniel Schwen · CC BY-SA 2.5 Its signature is the Landwasser Viaduct near Filisur. Built between 1901 and 1902 of dark limestone without conventional scaffolding, it curves on five tall piers 65 m above the river and runs straight into a tunnel bored through a sheer cliff, so that a train appears to pour out of the rock face onto the arches. Designed by Alexander Acatos, it is only 136 m long, but few railway bridges have become such an image of an entire country.
Did you know? Before the railway opened, the journey from Chur to the spa of St. Moritz took about 14 hours by stagecoach.
02 Semmering railway
Semmeringbahn
Austria · 36.8 km from Wiener Neustadt47.643° N 15.831° E
Haeferl · CC BY-SA 3.0 at The line runs 41 km from Gloggnitz in Lower Austria to Mürzzuschlag in Styria and overcomes a height difference of about 460 metres. Its builder was Carl von Ghega, born in Venice, who directed the work from 1848 to 1854 with a workforce of around 20,000 people. Rather than drive straight through the mountains, he followed the terrain: the route includes 14 tunnels, among them the 1,431-metre summit tunnel, 16 viaducts — several of them two storeys high — more than 100 stone-arched bridges and 11 smaller iron bridges. Gradients reach 2.5 percent, and curves tighten to a radius of 190 metres along a sixth of the way.
Did you know? About a third of the roughly 20,000 people who built the railway were women.
03 Furka Cogwheel Steam Railway
Dampfbahn Furka-Bergstrecke
Switzerland · 38.6 km from Sarnen46.561° N 8.362° E
Arthur Meyer · CC BY-SA 3.0 Construction began in 1911, stalled during the First World War, and the line finally opened in 1925 as part of the Furka Oberalp railway. It was always a struggle. Avalanches made the route impossible in winter, so every autumn the overhead wires were taken down, the tunnel portals shut with gates, and the Steffenbach bridge was folded away out of reach of the avalanches, only to be reassembled after a winter lasting nearly seven months. When the Furka Base Tunnel opened in 1982 the mountain section was abandoned, and by law it should have been dismantled.
Did you know? It is often counted as the second-highest rail crossing in Europe, after the Bernina line in Graubünden.
04 Flåm Line
Norway60.863° N 7.115° E
W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0 The trip is less a transfer than a descent through a sequence of landscapes. At the top, Myrdal sits among bare fells and snowfields, reachable only by rail. Below, the train edges along the steep walls of Flåmsdalen, with waterfalls falling from the cliffs on both sides and the valley floor opening up hundreds of metres beneath. Near the top of the descent it stops at Kjosfossen, where a platform was built in 1951 so passengers could step out beside a waterfall that plunges around 225 m in total.
Did you know? The longest tunnel, Nåli, runs for 1,341.5 metres, and the line climbs from 2 metres above sea level at Flåm to 863.6 metres at Myrdal.
05 Ffestiniog Railway
United Kingdom52.924° N 4.127° W
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain The railway then became a laboratory for narrow-gauge steam. Its first locomotives arrived in 1863, passenger trains followed in 1865, making it the first narrow-gauge line in Britain to carry passengers, and in 1869 came the first of the double Fairlies, articulated engines with a boiler and chimney at each end, which remain the railway's emblem. In 1872 it introduced the first bogie carriages in Britain, two of which still run. With the slate trade in decline, passenger services ended in 1939 and slate traffic in 1946, and the line was left to become overgrown.
06 Šargan Eight
Шарганска осмица
Serbia43.800° N 19.522° E
Darren Foreman from Surbiton, England · CC BY 2.0 The line was built to the 760 mm "Bosnian gauge" as part of the narrow-gauge route between Belgrade and Sarajevo. Work began during the First World War under Austro-Hungarian occupation and was halted after a tunnel collapse in 1916; it resumed in 1921 under the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and the first train reached Vardište on the Bosnian side on 25 January 1925. Replaced by standard-gauge railways and roads, the whole route closed in 1974 and the track was lifted.
Did you know? Austro-Hungarian engineers drove the first route straight through the village cemetery at Markovo Polje, which remains split in two, though trains never ran there.
07 Bernina railway line
Berninabahn
Switzerland46.409° N 10.020° E
Image by hpgruesen from Pixabay What makes the ride exceptional is how much of the high Alps it shows in a short distance. From the Engadine the line passes the Montebello curve, where the Morteratsch Glacier and the Bernina massif open up across the valley, then climbs to Ospizio Bernina at 2,253 m, the highest point, beside the pale waters of Lago Bianco. The lake sits on the divide between the Danube and Po basins: rain that falls on one side reaches the Black Sea, on the other the Adriatic. Just beyond, Alp Grüm stands at the tree line as the last station before the language changes to Italian, and from there the track drops in a series of loops and hairpins towards the Valposchiavo far below.
Did you know? The line was built mainly to serve hydroelectric plants south of the pass and was financed by the power company's investors, without cantonal subsidy.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful heritage railways in Europe?
- On our list, Albula Railway (Switzerland) ranks first, followed by Semmering railway (Austria) and Furka Cogwheel Steam Railway (Switzerland).
- Which country has the most heritage railways in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Switzerland (3), Austria (1) and Norway (1).
- What is the Šargan Eight?
- It is a narrow-gauge heritage railway near Mokra Gora in western Serbia, named for the figure-of-eight loop by which it climbs the Šargan pass. It was revived as a tourist line in the early 2000s on the route of an old line to Sarajevo.
- Why is the Semmering railway a World Heritage Site?
- Built between 1848 and 1854, it was the first railway to cross a high mountain range in Europe. UNESCO recognised it as one of the great feats of civil engineering of its time, set within a landscape it helped open to tourism.
- Which railway crosses the Alps at the highest point?
- The Bernina line of the Rhaetian Railway, which crosses the Bernina Pass at about 2,253 metres at Ospizio Bernina without the help of a rack.
- How many heritage railways are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 7 heritage railways in 5 countries. Switzerland has the most, with 3.