These majestic train routes will change the way you travel.

By: Victoria Heath

Human history is shaped by transportation, and the railroad in particular has become a sought-after time capsule for travelers to explore and romanticize. Every summer, teenage backpackers embark on weeklong journeys throughout Europe via rail as a rite-of-passage, while every spring, blissful couples pose on rustic train tracks for engagement photos. The train not only connected the world faster than ever before, but also brought people together—to each other, to their environments and to their futures.

Today, train travel is experiencing a renaissance, not only in Europe but also across the world. Amtrak found that its ridership had increased 51% between 2001 and 2013, particularly for inner-city travel. Although daily commuting accounts for part of this resurgence (trains allow people to work in busy cities but live in more serene towns), it’s also due to the growing desire travelers have to “connect” with the places they explore, as well as retain a certain level of “freedom.” One such traveler, Jack Donarchy, while traveling from the town of Yokosuka, Japan to the airport, found himself lost on the train. “I had a window seat and was allowing my mind to wander with the rhythm of the train. Suddenly, a switch flipped inside my head and I realized that even though I’d spent the last two years in Japan, I was seeing—really seeing—the country for the first time.” The train takes travelers through the heart of a place—cruising through both its majestic landscapes, untouched by humans, and its forgotten underbellies abandoned in history.

The “Puffing Devil” and the revolution it started.

Invented in 1801 by Richard Trevithick at the height of the Industrial Revolution, the first steam-powered passenger locomotive was a shocking sight for contemporary travelers who witnessed its debut in England. Nicknamed the “Puffing Devil,” it was loud, dirty and visually jarring with its black, iron body and steaming top. Yet one witness described it as “a little bird, going faster than I could walk.”

Although the “Puffing Devil” would ultimately puff out just a few days later, a seed had been planted that would grow into centuries of rail travel. For those experiencing the Industrial Revolution, trains were a “reminder” that the world had changed. Railways became one of the “few places that upper and middle class came face to face with industrial machinery.”

The effects of the railway became known as the “annihilation of time and space,” because not only did it allow people to travel quicker and access places unimaginable before (it is also the reason we have standardized time), but it profoundly changed people’s relationships with nature.

Industrial machinery became a part of the natural landscape, with train tracks stretching across vast prairies, penetrating the bases of snow-capped mountains, and running through the centres of rural towns.

So here we are, 215 years after the “Puffing Devil” made its first climb up a meager little hill in Cornwall, and there seems to be an unlimited amount of train routes you can take that will quench your thirst for a freer, more ‘connected’ way to travel.

Instead of wasting hours in airport lines, and thousands of dollars on cramped flights that leave you lethargic, why not take the track less traveled, and see the world as those who braved the first train routes in the early 1800s did? As Marcel Proust once said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”