The best window seats in Europe

What it’s really like

The Bergen line spends seven hours doing what a flight does in fifty minutes, and wins the comparison effortlessly. Pine forest gives way to bare rock, then to the Hardangervidda’s snow-patch moonscape at Finse — 1,222 metres, no road access, polar-expedition history — before the long green dive to the west coast. Left side for the plateau lakes; we’ll tell you when to swap.

At Myrdal you change to the Flåm branch: twenty kilometres, 866 vertical metres, waterfalls on both sides and a five-minute photo stop at Kjosfossen where the train simply waits, because of course it does. It delivers you to sea level, at the head of a UNESCO fjord, calmer than any arrival lounge in aviation.

Then there are the night trains — Sweden’s Arctic sleeper gliding from Stockholm to Abisko and Narvik while you sleep through 1,500 kilometres of forest, and Finland’s Santa Claus Express rolling into Rovaniemi at breakfast. Private cabin, thin curtain, the world scrolling past: slow travel’s best trick is that it never feels slow.