Wanderlust Travel Awards 2009 - Top Rail Journey

1    West Highland Line, Glasgow-Mallaig, Scotland    104 votes

2    Cuzco-Puno/Lake Titicaca, Peru    80 votes

3    Cuzco-Machu Picchu, Peru    62 votes

4    Trans-Siberian    48 votes

=5    Eurostar    46 votes

=5    Rocky Mountaineer, Western Canada    46 votes

7    Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (‘Toy Train’), India    32 votes

8    TranzAlpine, Christchurch-Greymouth, New Zealand    28 votes

9    Orient Express    26 votes

=10 Devil’s Nose, Ecuador    22 votes

=10    The Ghan, Darwin-Adelaide, Australia    22 votes

Scotland’s West Highland Line doesn’t blazon itself as boldly as some of the self-avowed Great Train Journeys it overhauled in this new category – and perhaps that’s why it won.

For the Glasgow-Mallaig line only inveigles itself into your affections stealthily. Although in summer you can ride on the photogenic Jacobite Express steam engine (from Fort William to Mallaig), the rest of the year it’s a humdrum ScotRail affair which crawls out of Glasgow without much fanfare or initial promise. But as the city suburbs fade away, the fun begins: Loch Lomond swings alongside, and then the Highland junction of Crianlarich and the deer-pocked void of Rannoch Moor.

At Fort William comes the miraculous run to the west coast. Skirting lochs, larch and shaggy Highland cattle, the line soon hugs Loch Eil – where Bonnie Prince Charlie landed to rally his troops in 1745 – before crossing the 21-arch viaduct at Glenfinnan (well known to Harry Potter fans).

Now the landscape soars around you on all sides, the train trundling between gigantic tumbles of rock, before hitting the coast, teasing you with views of the sonorous isles of Eigg, Muck and Rum, and finally emerging, nonchalantly, beside the pier at Mallaig. In a few hours you’ve been served up some of Scotland’s finest and wildest scenery – and you haven’t even got your boots wet.

A footnote: one reader was more concerned about the departure point than the journey. Their nomination? ‘Coventry to anywhere’.

>>See the rest of the award winners here