Last year sceptics thought it was a fluke. But lightning has struck twice in the same place. Wanderlust travel magazine has seen its readers again vote the West Highland Line the World’s Best Train Journey. Much of it runs through Argyll. It skirts Loch Lomond and Loch Etive. It slides below Munro’s (3,000ft+ high mountains) like Ben Vorlich. It rounds the Horseshoe Curve by Ben Doran, west of Tyndrum in the approaches to Rannoch Moor. It traverses the great moor itself. It creeps above the Monessie Gorge, takes a secret look at the back of the Nevis range and runs down the Roy valley on the way to Spean Bridge, dropping back south to Fort William.

Then it’s a change of train – to the steam-driven Jacobite in the tourist season for the run on out to the west.

This runs down Loch Eil, past Glenfinnan, still reverberating from the gathering of the clans under Bonnie Prince Charlie for the 1745 rebellion; round the famous viaduct (the world’s first concrete rail viaduct); and on past the white sands of Arisaig and Loch Morar to finish up at Mallaig, facing the mass of Knoydart and the last crossing over the sea to Skye.

Eurostar, from London to Paris, came second; the Trans-Siberian, from Moscow to Beijing, third; Peru’s Andean Explorer, from Cusco to Puno, fourth; and Australia’s The Ghan, from Adelaide via Alice Springs to Darwin,  fifth.

The locations of the top five journeys suggest that Wanderlusts’s readers – or those who tend to vote anyway, are western oriented. Beyond that, the Harry Potter films shot one of the series’ most famous scenes on the line – the car versus Hogwarts Express train chase – on the great curving viaduct between Fort William and Mallaig. That will have brought it an ever wider audience.

That said, the West Highland is a cracker. We described it in the piece we published last year to record its first top place in this competition so we won’t repeat that. It’s not changed. It’s still a must-do.

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