Europe in Motion
Europe by rail
Places we have tagged for slow travel by rail: reachable without flying, and worth the arriving. The Journey Planner will build a route through them with no flights in it.
The query Any destination tagged Slow travel by rail. Run against all 319 destinations on every build, and nothing here is hand-picked — there is no field for naming a destination in a motion, deliberately. 20 match, in 6 countries; the 11 below are at most two per country.
All of them tagged Slow travel by rail.
Bacharach & the Rhine Gorge
Half-timbered wine village under a ruined chapel, in the 65-kilometre UNESCO stretch of castles.
Cologne
A Roman city with a Gothic cathedral that took 632 years and dominates everything.
Balestrand
A Sognefjord village of dragon-style timber villas, where 19th-century painters came and then stayed.
Bergen
A hanseatic trading port wedged between seven mountains, wet 200 days a year and entirely unbothered about it.
Pinhão & the Douro valley
Terraced schist vineyards falling into a dammed river, worked by hand because machines cannot stand up on them.
Porto
Steep, granite and blue-tiled, with port lodges across the river and an ocean at the end of the tram line.
Mokra Gora
A mountain village on the Šargan Eight, a narrow-gauge line that climbs a figure of eight to gain height.
Studenica
A 12th-century monastery of white marble in a wooded valley, with frescoes from 1209 and monks still living there.
Bern
The federal capital: six kilometres of arcades, a river you swim down, and Einstein's flat above a café.
Lauterbrunnen
A valley with vertical walls and seventy-two waterfalls, and car-free villages on the shelves above it.
Eryri / Snowdonia (Betws-y-Coed)
Slate, lakes and the highest mountains in England and Wales, in a national park with a Welsh-speaking heart.
Journeys that go this way
Midnight sun to hanseatic brick
Arctic to the Baltic
Tromsø · Lofoten (Svolvær) · Abisko · Stockholm · Helsinki · Tallinn · Riga
Six valleys, four countries, one mountain range
The Alpine Grand Tour
Chamonix · Zermatt · Lauterbrunnen · St. Moritz & the Engadin · Innsbruck · Ortisei & the Dolomites
London to Budapest by rail
The European Heritage Route
London · Canterbury · Bruges · Amsterdam · Cologne · Prague · Vienna · Budapest
Themes that run through it
Journeys where the train is the destination
Rail Europe
Flåm · St. Moritz & the Engadin · Bacharach & the Rhine Gorge · Mokra Gora · Eryri / Snowdonia (Betws-y-Coed) · Pinhão & the Douro valley · Abisko · Lauterbrunnen
The eighteenth-century route, still walkable
The Grand Tour
Paris · Lauterbrunnen · Milan · Venice · Florence · Rome · Naples · Athens
Build this into a route
The Journey Planner weights the same tags this page queries on, so choosing Slow travel by rail there will build a route through places like these. Plan a journey → · Discover mode →