The beautiful 121-mile UK train ride with no tourists that's among the best in Europe
This spectacular rural railway line is used exclusively by locals and boasts some of the best landscapes found anywhere in Britain.
The Russian Trans-Siberian Express, the Bergensbanen in Norway, Switzerland's Glacier Express, or the mighty Nova Gorica to Jesenice in Slovenia. These are some of the most scenic and jaw-dropping railway routes in Europe, in world-beating locations surrounded by sprawling and wild landscapes, attracting thousands of tourists each year.
According to the experts, however, none is better than one simple line that snakes through a nondescript stretch of Britain.
Lonely Planet, the internationally respected travel guide publisher, picked Wales' Swansea to Shrewsbury line as its "best train ride in Europe".
The commuter line is one of the last of its kind in Britain, and though it signals a time before high-speed rail and the more common luxuries of train travel, it still serves its purpose hundreds of years on.
It is an unlikely choice given the travel experts' history of picking out far-flung corners of the world.
Few will have heard of the otherwise ordinary railway line — but perhaps that is why Lonely Planet picked it.
"This is Swansea to Shrewsbury the slow and, frankly, surreal way," the reviewers wrote. "This one-carriage train traverses track through Wales and England that might easily have been consigned to a museum or an out-of-print book, but that has somehow defied time and logic to survive as a passenger route.
"Expect a spectrum of scenery, alternating from the sand-edged estuaries of South Wales, via bucolic farming towns and tracts of forest and hill country you probably never knew existed, through to one of England’s prettiest medieval cities.
"This four-hour, 34-station zigzag passes almost no major sights or countryside villages, but a very high concentration of spectacularly zany ones."
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For over 150 years, the Heart of Wales line, or Rheilffordd Calon Cymru, as it is known, has snaked through the lush hinterlands of Mid and West Wales, linking Shropshire via South Wales through a host of spa towns, remote rural villages, and idyllic estuaries.
Today, trains run as much as four times a day along the single-track line and travel at an average of just 60mph.
The route was opened in stages from 1861 by several different private railway companies, including the Knighton Railway, the Central Wales Railway and the Central Wales Extension Railway.
It wouldn't be until 1868 that the line in its entirety was complete and used as a single track.
A hundred years later, a government report proposed that the line should be closed, but the plans were opposed and eventually axed.
The local communities are likely pleased: they have formed volunteer groups and look after the stations, regularly tending the flowers and plants and ensuring everything is spic and span for travellers passing through and disembarking at their end-of-the-line towns.