Train Journeys Worth Taking the Slow Route For

The fast train gets you there. The slow one gets you somewhere in between, which is usually where the good part of the trip was hiding all along. This is not an argument against speed. It is an argument for occasionally choosing against your own convenience.

Why the window matters more than the schedule

A train window does something no other form of travel quite manages. It hands you a landscape without asking you to do anything with it. You don't have to drive, navigate or watch for exits. You just sit, and the country moves past at a pace your eyes can actually keep up with.

In the Swiss Alps, this becomes almost theatrical. Lines built more than a century ago still climb through valleys and over viaducts that were engineered as much for the view as for the crossing. Nobody was in a hurry when these routes were laid, and it shows in how generously they curve toward the scenery instead of away from it.

Japan's local lines

Skip the bullet train for an afternoon and take a local line instead, the kind that stops in towns you have never heard of and probably never will again. These trains run at the rhythm of rural life: a farmer boarding with vegetables, a school group getting off two stops later, rice paddies unfolding in every direction outside the glass.

The etiquette of slowness

• Bring food for the journey, not just a snack. Slow trains are made for proper meals eaten with a view.
• Leave the headphones off for at least one stretch. Trains have their own sound, and it is worth hearing.
• Don't overplan connections. A missed transfer on a slow route is rarely a disaster, just a different afternoon.

Where this works best

Look for regional lines that follow rivers, coastlines or mountain passes rather than cutting through tunnels to save time. In Europe, this often means older narrow gauge routes in Switzerland, Austria and parts of the Balkans. In Japan, it means the countryside networks connecting smaller cities rather than the shinkansen corridors between major ones.

The scenery doesn't wait for you to be ready. It just keeps happening outside the glass, whether you're paying attention or not.

There is a version of this trip where you treat the train as a delay between two more important things. There is another version where the train is the important thing, and everything else is what happens around it. The second version tends to be the one people remember.