Discover Europe with affordable first-class Eurail adventures

The duck-like beak of the sleek AVE high-speed train points the way south out of Madrid as it trundles sedately along a tangle of tracks before picking up speed and turning east towards Valencia, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast.

First class consists of great armchairs – single seats on either side of the aisle with vast amounts of leg room. My tray table is down to hold a novel, and to receive a snack and a coffee in due course. But despite the carriage’s pleasantly woody interior, the adequate Wi-fi and the book to hand, there’s every reason to look out rather than in. A banquet of scenery is brought to the window at up to 300km/h (186mph) – broad valleys with castle-topped promontories, looking as if borrowed from Renaissance paintings.

I arrive in Valencia two hours later with not a page turned, and with five more weeks of comfortable travel around Europe still ahead.

These days, there’s no shortage of manufactured luxury train trips that promise a revival of some historic golden age of railways, even if no such service ever existed quite as suggested. Carriages of supposedly colonial-era magnificence are sometimes brand new creations, and services named for famous trains of the past may run on routes that only approximate those of the originals, or are of entirely new invention.

There’s certainly much to be said for having a smartly liveried attendant slide back your state compartment door mid-afternoon to spread out snowy table linen, gleaming cutlery and a heavily laden cake stand, even if the motion of the train sometimes causes them to miss the cup when pouring the tea. But such journeys are artificial, and no more resemble “real” rail travel than a cruise liner resembles a ferry. No passengers board or alight at intermediate stops, and the nearest you’ll have to a conversation with a local is when asked whether you would prefer first or second sitting for dinner, and whether you’d like the lamb or the lobster.