There is a particular quality to time aboard a great train — an unhurried expansiveness that air travel extinguishes and road travel cannot replicate. As the landscape scrolls past your window and a pianist plays softly in the bar car, the journey ceases to be a means of reaching somewhere and becomes, entirely and completely, the point.
Luxury train travel is experiencing a genuine renaissance. In 2026, several of the world’s most celebrated rail services are introducing new routes and restored carriages, while an entirely new train — the long-awaited L’Orient Express — prepares to reclaim the legacy of the original 1883 service that defined the golden age of rail.
Venice Simplon-Orient-Express
The standard against which all luxury trains are measured, the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express operates 17 meticulously restored carriages dating from the 1920s and 1930s. Assembled by Belmond and bearing the imprimatur of the most storied name in railway history, the train connects London, Paris, Venice, Istanbul, and a constellation of Europe’s finest cities through a schedule that has been expanded for 2026.
The interiors establish the template: polished marquetry, plush fabrics, René Lalique glass panels, and the intimate scale of cabins that transform from daytime salons to sleeping quarters each evening. Three accommodation categories — Historic Cabins, Cabin Suites, and six Grand Suites — offer varying degrees of space and privacy, with the Grand Suites representing some of the most coveted accommodation in world travel regardless of category.
A significant 2026 addition sees the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express launch a new route from Paris to Italy’s Amalfi Coast, inaugurating in May. The journey combines a night aboard the train with extended time at Ravello’s Caruso hotel — an eleventh-century palazzo transformed into one of southern Italy’s most celebrated retreats — alongside boat tours of the Amalfi coastline, cooking classes with local producers, and a guided visit to Pompeii.
L’Orient Express: A Revival
The original Orient Express — the "rolling palace" that operated from 1883 until 1977, threading through Budapest, Vienna, Strasbourg, Bucharest, and Munich — is being reborn. L’Orient Express, distinct from the Belmond service, has been conceived as a work of art in its own right, with restored art deco carriages crafted by thirty master artisans including glassmakers, embroiderers, upholsterers, and cabinetmakers.
Rovos Rail: Africa in Splendour
On a different continent and in a different register entirely, Rovos Rail offers what many seasoned travellers consider the world’s most romantically satisfying rail experience. Operating between Cape Town, Pretoria, Dar es Salaam, and Victoria Falls, these meticulously maintained vintage trains — Edwardian carriages restored to their original specifications — carry guests through southern Africa’s most dramatic landscapes.
The journey from Cape Town to Dar es Salaam runs for ten nights, traversing South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania at a pace that allows the continent to reveal itself gradually. Open-air observation cars provide unobstructed views; the dining car serves formal dinners that would not embarrass any fine restaurant; and the sleeper suites — some with private en-suite bathrooms — offer sanctuary of genuine quality.
Rovos Rail succeeds because it resists the temptation to modernise what works. The trains are genuinely historic, the pace genuinely slow, and the experience genuinely transformative.
Belmond Royal Scotsman
Scotland’s landscape — Highland moors, loch shores, and whisky country — has long attracted travellers willing to journey slowly through it. The Belmond Royal Scotsman, operating on journeys of two to seven nights, makes that slow journey an occasion. Tweed and tartan interiors, an open-sided observation car, and shore excursions to distilleries and Highland estates create an experience rooted specifically in Scottish culture rather than generic luxury.
The train accommodates a maximum of 36 guests across its sleeping carriages, creating an intimacy closer to a private house party than a hotel stay — which is, of course, precisely the point.
Why Trains Now
The renaissance of luxury rail travel reflects something real about how the world’s most experienced travellers are choosing to spend their time. The opacity of air travel — its disconnection from landscape, its compression of experience — increasingly feels like a limitation rather than a convenience. A great train restores the traveller to the journey itself: the passing scenery, the shared dining car, the rhythm of wheels on track.
For those who have visited everywhere, the how of getting there has become as important as the where.
