What is it with British trains and urban blight? This is quite a pretty country, but you wouldn’t know it from many of our railways. Maybe it’s an accident of history, maybe it’s the work of evil planners, but our busiest lines seem to be carefully routed through the most godforsaken spots possible. If you’re reading this on a train, look out of the window: bet you it’s so grimy out there, you can hardly read the graffiti.

That’s because you’re on the wrong train. Away from the packed commuter routes and main intercities, the backwaters of our national network harbour some of the most beautiful rides in the world, and one in particular stands out.

I know, I know, nobody should get sentimental about railway lines — there’s a ring of M&S leisurewear and loneliness about it, and it seems to imply there isn’t enough going on in your life — but it’s not my fault. I challenge anyone with a soul to ride the Settle-Carlisle line and not fall in love.

They reckon it’s the most beautiful stretch of track in Britain. (You might argue that’s not surprising, the “they” in question being an organisation called the Friends of the Settle-Carlisle Line, but that misses the point — how many bits of the national rail network have a bunch of pals to cheer for them?) It isn’t a hobby line, run for fun by smut-covered enthusiasts.

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This is an honest-to-goodness working railway, with bog-standard diesels going about their business, pulling commuters and coal trucks. They just happen to go through Britain’s most breathtakingly lovely country as they do so. If you’ve never been on the line, you’re missing out.

Coming from the south, you get on at Leeds. (Bit of a downer, but don’t worry; things get better.) Nab a window seat on the right for the best views later on. Your fellow passengers aren’t train nuts, but a normal bunch on ordinary errands. There was only one anorak in my carriage, and that was worn with hiking boots, which makes it okay.

Just a few minutes out into Airedale, the chain-link fences give way to dry-stone walls. (Well, dryish. It does rain a fair bit up here.) Past Shipley, Saltaire and Bingley, solid old mill towns still dominated by their solid old mills, you reach the real start of things at Settle, a jumble of sleepy stone nestling under high crags.

From here on up, you’re in the Yorkshire Dales National Park and, blimey, it’s lovely. Tracking the sparkling River Ribble along its lush green valley, you climb steadily out past the tree line onto the wide, high moors.

Up here, it’s all huge skies, rushing clouds, waving grass, constantly changing light. To the left, the peaks of Ingleborough and Whernside were frosted with snow on a cold, clear winter’s day. They’re splendid, but not in a flashy way: no ostentatious precipices or soaring summits for them, just noble contours and reassuring bulk. This is Yorkshire, and you don’t get above yourself, even if you’re a mountain.

Far off to the right, isolated stone farms huddle under the dark mass of Pen-y-Ghent. In our dreams, most city-dwellers fantasise about living somewhere as wildly beautiful as this, but in reality we’d have to eat our children before the first winter was out, so it’s probably just as well that we stick to the train, where it’s warm and dry, and the tea trolley is just coming round.

The country gets still wilder, higher and hillier. There’s a desolate beauty here, and an intangible air of menace too — you’re in the middle of overcrowded England, but every windblasted rock and tussock makes it clear this isn’t a landscape that people were meant to inhabit.

It strikes you that building a railway up here in the first place shows a level of ambition bordering on stupidity. (In fact, the Midland Railway tried to pull out when it realised how tough it would be, but parliament would not let it.)

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