The one that always used to underwhelm me is the Lakeside and Haverthwaite. It's quite short and you can barely see any of the lakes through the trees and there's not really that much at each end. It is however a long time since I've been, and the loco roster looks a bit more interesting these days, when I used to visit it always seemed to be industrial tank engines, nowadays they look to have more mainline loco's. I should probably give it a revisit soon to see whether it has improved.
Whilst I admit to being very hard to please where preserved lines are concerned; I've always felt re the Lakeside & Haverthwaite, "they shouldn't have bothered" (and I have seen that undertaking more than once, though not travelled on it). I'm rather allergic to preserved lines which are totally physically isolated (as distinct from actual-physical-connection or not, at junction points with the main system) -- so the L & H is for that reason, a "loser" for me; and it is indeed to my mind, woefully short. If it could have been possible to preserve the whole of the branch: can see self greatly liking it -- set basically in a lovely part of the world, even if views might be better (dratted trees !
-- often [not without reason] found a scenic detriment these days). Always fearsome obstacles, admittedly, to any reopening south of Haverthwaite -- a big bridge gone, and a lot of the formation obliterated by road construction.
And when the branch was in normal service, trains joined the main line at station-less Plumpton Junction, and ran the couple of miles along the main, to / from Ulverston. That would be unthinkable nowadays. A similar issue has been addressed on the Isle of Wight, with Smallbrook Junction having come into being; but don't think that any equivalent of that has been possible, administratively or practically, on the "mainland".
The most boring railway I have visited is the East Kent Railway at Shepherds Well. The majority of the route is either in a tunnel or deep cutting.
That does sound fairly dire. One feels that this line would be more fun, if it were not confined to the short stub of it at the Shepherds Well end; whose survival long enough to be preserved, was due to its having been retained to serve a colliery or two. The system's route further north -- abandoned some seventy years ago, I believe -- was classically bonkers standard-gauge-light-railway through pleasant countryside. One suspects that the East Kent's having been one of the Colonel Stephens group of independent light railways up to nationalisation in 1948, might have been a big factor in the remaining section's having attracted a preservation undertaking -- irrespective of its not being particularly attractive in its own right. Had it all been just a bog-standard offshoot of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway; would there have been enough interest to get the preservation project off the ground?
