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The Belmond Grand Hibernian brings a "shimmering world of indulgence" to the Irish countryside. Its cushy observation cars offer pristine views from Dublin to Cork or Belfast.

For the 2016 season, full six-night "Grand Tour of Ireland" journeys are scheduled to run Tuesday-to-Monday, as these would consist of both the south-westerly "Legends and Loughs" and northerly "Taste of Ireland" segments with a change-over for some passengers in Dublin on the Saturday of each week.

2. TranzAlpine

In New Zealand, the TranzAlpine lets riders take in the epic vistas and awe-inspiring plains between Christchurch and Greymouth. It covers 139 miles in just under five hours.

It  was introduced on 22 November 1987 to replace the conventional Christchurch-Greymouth express trains and became one of the New Zealand Railways Corporation's 'new' tourist oriented passenger services utilising refurbished rolling stock. Accompanying this new-look train were a new-look livery and rebranding.

The century-old Orient Express transports riders to the golden age of rail travel, with its four-course dinners and black-tie glamour. It runs from London to Venice in two days.

The route and rolling stock of the Orient Express changed many times. Several routes in the past concurrently used the Orient Express name, or slight variations. Although the original Orient Express was simply a normal international railway service, the name became synonymous with intrigue and luxury travel.

4.The Ghan

The Ghan takes riders through the fiery red center of Australia, offering access to the dramatic scenery and indigenous sites that are off-limits by other modes of transit.

Construction of what was then known as the Port Augusta to Government Gums Railway began in 1878 when Premier of South Australia William Jervois broke ground at Port Augusta. The 1,070 mm (3 ft 6 in) line reached Hawker in June 1880, Beltana in July 1881, Marree in January 1884 and Oodnadatta in January 1891.

5.Trans-Siberian

The Trans-Siberian Railway offers a 14-day excursion through Russia, from Vladivostok to Moscow, that passes by endless grasslands and Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on Earth.

It was built between 1891 and 1916 under the supervision of Russian government ministers personally appointed by Tsar Alexander III and his son, the Tsarevich Nicholas (later Tsar Nicholas II). Even before it had been completed, it attracted travellers who wrote of their adventures.

6.Shongololo Express

Passage aboard Africa's best affordable railway, the Shongololo Express,It proposes two different itineraries of a duration of about fifteen days. One that crosses the most beautiful cities of South Africa from Johannesburg to Cape Town via Port Elizabeth , the other crosses six African countries ( Zimbabwe , Zambia , Botswana , Mozambique , South Africa and Swaziland ) with among others as a highlight, the passage over Victoria Falls and the Zambezi River .

7.Tren alas Nubes

The Train to the Clouds follows zig-zag tracks across the rugged Andes on its way from Salta, Argentina, to the Chilean border. It's one of the highest train rides in the world.

The route was designed by American engineer Richard Maury, (who later died in Salta) and after whom one of the stations has been named. The complete railway was inaugurated on 20 February 1948, following numerous delays and complications and a 2-year period where work was paralyzed

8.Glacier Express

The Glacier Express connects two major mountain resorts in the Swiss Alps, giving riders a whirlwind tour of Switzerland's snowy peaks, mountain meadows, and storybook villages.

The trip on the Glacier Express is a 7½ hour railway journey across 291 bridges, through 91 tunnels and across the Oberalp Pass on the highest point at 2,033 m (6,670 ft) in altitude. The entire line is metre gauge (narrow gauge railway), and large portions of it use a rack-and-pinion system both for ascending steep grades and to control the descent of the train on the back side of those grades.

Royal Rajasthan on Wheels is a luxury resort aboard a train — complete with a spa — that takes riders past India's temples, forts, and Taj Mahal on a seven-night passage.

The 14 luxury cabins housed within the Royal Rajasthan on Wheels have been named after some erstwhile royal palace of Rajasthan. Categorized into Deluxe and Super Deluxe saloons, these cabins come equipped with amenities such as Wi-Fi internet, Satellite TV, Channel music system and Individual temperature control.Deluxe saloons have three cabins Ruby.

10.VIA Rail Canada

Passengers of the Canadian spend three days watching golden prairie fields, rugged lake country, and picturesque towns pass by their dome cars from Toronto to Vancouver.

Yearly passenger levels on Canada's passenger trains peaked at 60 million during World War II. Following the war the growth of air travel and the personal automobile caused significant loss of mode share for Canada's passenger train operators.

11.California Zephyr

There's no better way to see the heartland of America than the California Zephyr, a railway that climbs the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada before descending to the Pacific Coast.

During year 2016, the California Zephyr carried more than 410,000 passengers, an increase of 10.8% on 2015. The train had a total revenue of $51.4m in 2016 The California Zephyr is part of Amtrak's long distance national network and partial funding for it is provided by the federal government.

The Belgrade to Bar railway takes passengers over 435 bridges and through 254 tunnels from Serbia's capital to the shores of the Adriatic in Montenegro, in about 10 hours.

The decision to build the railway connection between Belgrade and Bar was made in 1952, as a national project of the SFRY. However, the construction was passed to the constituent Republics, SR Serbia and SR Montenegro, to build on their own.

Congratulations to Weiss, Barish, Thorne (and all their colleagues)!

Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne have won the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics. The three are members of the LIGO-Virgo detector collaboration that discovered gravitational waves.

"This year's prize is about a discovery that shook the world," said the Nobel committee representative during a news conference in Stockholm on Tuesday.

One half of the prize went to Weiss, born in Berlin and now a US citizen, who is a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The other half was split by Barish, a Nebraska native, and Thorne, who was born in Utah. Both work at the California Institute of Technology.

"When we first discovered them back in September 2015 many of us didn't believe it," said Weiss, on the phone to the Stockholm conference.

It took months for the scientists to convince themselves that they had in fact heard gravitational waves, he said.

The Nobel committee has awarded a prize in physics 111 times since 1901. Last year, three researchers won for their work in the field of topology.

Topology, as The Washington Post reported, is the study of state changes more intricate than the pivot from liquid to solid.

The 2016 laureates discovered exotic transformations that turn matter into superconductors or frictionless liquids, able to swirl in a never-slowing vortex.

Winners of the Nobel Prize in physics join a rarefied group that counts Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Niels Bohr as members. More recent laureates include University of Manchester scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who won the 2010 prize. They performed groundbreaking experiments with graphene, a lattice of carbon a single atom thick.

In 2013, François Englert and Peter Higgs won for predicting a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, the existence of which was confirmed by the Large Hadron Collider in 2012.

Who will win a Nobel physics prize is often anyone's guess; the selection process is notoriously secretive.

But that does not curb speculation. The detection of black hole gravitational waves has been floated as a contender both this year and last. This year, the predictions came true.

A team of more than a thousand scientists, researchers and technicians, making up the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, discovered the first gravitational ripple in space-time in September 2015.

Detectors have sensed three other gravitational waves since then, all from merging black holes.

The LIGO team, plus the Italian Virgo detector, announced the most recent cosmic distortion discovery in September.

The Nobel Prize in chemistry will be announced on Wednesday, the literature prize on Thursday and the peace prize on Friday.

An award in economics, not one of the original prizes but now conducted in memory of Alfred Nobel, will be announced Monday.

2017 © The Washington Post

This article was originally published by The Washington Post.