Starting at just £14, these trips include a 500-mile epic, a sleeper and a twin-city break
Trains are a slow, stress-free way to enjoy a holiday. Enjoy the scenery while you sip a coffee or a beer; read a book as you travel to a festival, or visit several destinations instead of just one, as you take your time to appreciate the shift between them.
Rail companies across Europe have new routes, trains and special offers to entice passengers onto the tracks this summer. (Top tip: in Europe, check regional operators such as France’s TER services for special promotions – Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes is offering discounts of up to 40 per cent for journeys until the end of August.)
And some lines are always worth travelling, with unbeatable views from the windows. Here are seven journeys to consider making this summer…
Venice to Nova Gorica
One of this year’s European Capitals of Culture is Nova Gorica in Slovenia together with Gorizia, over the border in Italy (go2025.eu/sl). To celebrate this borderless cultural project, Trenitalia is running direct weekend services to Nova Gorica from Venice. The journey takes about two and a half hours, trundling through a level landscape of vineyards and orchards, maize and sugar beet.
Heading north, the railway follows the Soca Valley, passing Via del Rafut, where an estate was divided by the border in 1947. Nearby, in wisteria-hung Rafut Park, with its Art Nouveau villa, visitors can scan QR codes to hear music by Schumann or Symphonic Forest by Slovenian composer Matej Bonin.
This summer’s events include exhibitions about fashion, manga and contemporary textile art, as well as theatre, music and film. And there are wineries, breweries, castles, boat trips and the chance to climb Sveta Gora (“holy mountain”), with its huge hilltop basilica and views towards the Julian Alps.
Trains run on weekends and Italian holidays and tickets cost around £14, trenitalia.com/it.html
Paris to Berlin 
Paris Plages on the Seine riverbank (Photo: Pawel Libera/Getty/The Image Bank RF)
Sleek new direct daytime trains between the French and German capitals launched in December 2024. The Deutsche Bahn ICE trains race through the sloping vineyards of Champagne and big-skied sunflower fields and meadows around Belzig, linking two superb summer destinations.
In Paris, the sweltering city summer is a time for outdoor cinema, free museums and umbrella-studded artificial beaches with riverside dancing, pétanque, pop-up bars, outdoor pools and pedal boat hire.
Less than two hours after leaving Paris, the train passes Strasbourg’s canals and tall-spired cathedral. Crossing the Rhine, there are distant hills, Karlsruhe Palace, and miles of woods before the train rolls into Berlin’s glass-walled Hauptbahnhof.
You might think Berlin, with its concrete and Christmas markets, is best for a winter trip, but it offers summer visitors a sunny buffet of al fresco beer gardens, ferry rides, and woodland walks to swimmable sandy-shored lakes, including Europe’s largest inland lido.
Catch the boat to flowering Peacock Island to wander through follies and fountains, or head east to the Badeschiff swimming pool on a giant barge.
One train daily in each direction takes about eight hours to complete the 770-mile journey. Advance tickets start from about £60, but you’d be lucky to find them this summer for much under £90, int.bahn.de
Prague to Gdynia
The Baltic Express leaves Prague station (Photo: Supplied)
Colourful houses and pinewoods scroll past outside the recently launched Baltic Express, running direct from the Czech capital to the Polish Riviera. The 500-mile journey takes nine hours, stopping in less-touristed towns such as cobbled Pardubice and Baroque Leszno. With four trains a day, you could pause at Wrocław for beer and pickles in the medieval market square or at Poznan to check out the almond-fragrant Croissant Museum and City Hall clock tower, where mechanical goats headbutt each other at noon.
There is hearty food on the train, too, as well as Wi-Fi and air-conditioning, with the dining car serving cheese dumplings and sour rye soup.
Past Gdansk, with its brick-gabled neo-Gothic railway station, the train runs on through honeysuckle-wreathed Park Kolibkowski. White-sand beaches and turquoise sea are hidden beyond the woods that line the shore.
Gdynia has a big choice of walks: stroll round the crumbling Orłowski Cliff or hike up into the hills. Urban attractions include an award-winning Emigration Museum, which celebrates its 10th birthday this summer and showcases souvenirs from two dynamic centuries of the Polish diaspora.
Trains leave four times a day from Prague’s Hlavní Nádraží station and advance tickets start at around £30 with a Super Promo International offer, intercity.pl/en, cd.cz/en
Carlisle to Leeds 
Enjoy views of the Cumbrian countryside (Photo: Getty/Moment RF/John Finney Photography)
Bracken and birch trees frame the valleys and viaducts on the Settle-Carlisle branch line in the Yorkshire Dales. In contrast to high-speed cross-border journeys, this is a leisurely, picturesque route through Cumbrian and Yorkshire countryside with connections to this year’s UK City of Culture, Bradford.
From red sandstone Carlisle, through the wooded Eden Valley, the line climbs the fells to Dent, England’s highest mainline station, before crossing the quarter-mile-long Ribblehead Viaduct and heading down towards Leeds.
With up to eight trains a day, you can hop on and off for spectacular station-to-station hikes through the Dales. The railway was a death-defying feat of late-Victorian engineering and twice avoided closure thanks to public protests.
Look out for muntjac deer bounding through the buttercups, grazing sheep in a patchwork of dry-stone walls, and hump-backed bridges over surging streams.
Change at Shipley for the 10-minute train journey into central Bradford or get off at Keighley to see this summer’s production of The Railway Children, complete with steam train ride. From Keighley, you can also catch the Brontë Bus to Haworth and find new moorland artworks in the waterfall-rich hills (bradford2025.co.uk/event/wild-uplands).
Standard tickets £26.60 (advance fares from £15.40), northernrailway.co.uk
Rome to Marseille 
Villefranche-sur-Mer and the bay of Villefranche (Photo: bbsferrari/Getty/iStockphoto/Sergey Dzyuba)
The Espresso Riviera is two world-class train experiences in one epic journey, running at weekends from July until September. First you get the night train, with fancy private cabins or a cheaper four-berth couchette, and then a scenic sunrise journey along the Mediterranean coast, arriving in Marseille for a late lunch. Here, passengers can catch the Jazz des Cinq Continents in July or the huge dance-tastic Delta festival on Marseille’s sandy Plage du Prado in August.
The train has comfy seats, a bar and dining car. Outside the big windows are palm-studded seafronts, boat-bobbing blue bays and white pine-topped cliffs. There are harbourside ochre houses along the Ligurian coast, flame-coloured façades in medieval Menton, posh villas at Cannes, the neo-Romanesque church of St-Raphaël.
The Espresso Riviera leaves Rome on Fridays and Marseille on Saturdays, from 4/5 July. An early-booking 25 per cent discount takes fares down to as little as £60 for a couchette bunk and breakfast, fstrenituristici.it
Cardiff to Edinburgh
The new train leaves Cardiff (pictured) and ends in Edinburgh (Photo: murat4art/Getty/iStock Editorial/MURATART)
Branded the Three Nations Connect, CrossCountry has introduced a direct weekday service from Cardiff to Edinburgh. The trip takes about seven and a half hours, covering 22 stations over 455 miles. It leaves Cardiff at 9.45am, arrives in Edinburgh in the early evening, and could be a leisurely, comprehensive sightseeing tour en route to the Fringe this summer.
The trains pass through a string of worthy stops, including York, Newcastle and some fabulous Northumberland coastal towns.
There is plenty to see en route, from the walls of Chepstow Castle above the wide River Wye to the cormorant-haunted coast of East Lothian. Don’t miss the view of Durham’s castle and Norman cathedral on a cliff above the Wear, or the walls and towers of Berwick-upon-Tweed as you cross the 28-arched Royal Border Bridge.
Advance tickets from £113.70 one way, but can be much cheaper and a bit faster if you change trains. crosscountrytrains.co.uk
Amsterdam to Munich
The Chinese Tower in the English Garden in Munich (Photo: Wirestock/Getty/iStock Editorial)
Canal-veined Amsterdam makes an ideal start for a summer adventure. Wander through herb- and herring-scented markets and streets full of gabled houses with hollyhocks by the door. Or catch a free ferry from the back of the railway station over the IJ to the cool cultural hub at NDSM wharf, once Europe’s largest shipyard.
There is a new direct daily Deutsche Bahn service between Amsterdam Central and Munich. It is a seven-hour trip, covering roughly 500 miles, and tickets start at around £34 (but can go up to around £90 if you don’t get in there quickly).
The journey starts through flat miles of polders, dotted with occasional windmills and long lines of poplars. This high-speed line doesn’t have much in the way of views until the last couple of hours when it flashes into the forested hills of Bavaria. The real reward is smoothly reaching Munich in the season of urban riverside beaches and festivals such as the Münchner Sommernachtstraum, with its spectacular musical fireworks.
Stroll 500m from the central station, under honey-scented linden trees, to the Ballabeni Werkstatt for a scoop of creamy hazelnut ice cream or citrussy sorbet. Then head to the Englischer Garten to find a shady waterside bench or beer and brass bands.
Munich is a gateway to the flowering summer Alps, with routes into the mountains for castles and cable cars.
A Bahncard will give you big discounts on rail travel until the end of September, int.bahn.de/en/offers/bahncard