What is it like to ride the train line from Sri Lanka's famous candies?

Getting into Candy on Ellatrain is a battle of bread that I never imagined. The dog gets lost in the hangar and pulls Sally, leading to screams from a group of local women as passengers try to board from either side of the train. The suitcase is pushed out of an open window, and the smell of spicy fried samosas floods the cabin with its owner. It's sticky as if bubble gum hangs under the ceiling fan.

The local nickname for the train, which has been praised as one of Asia's most scenic vehicles, is Podi Manike, meaning “little honey.” It's far from a tourist train. The timetable has long been linked to the decline and flow of local life. The British laid the foundations of the Rhine in the 19th century, gouging tunnels through the mountains and forged the valleys with viaducts. As for the beauty of all the routes, it was devised as a service line. It is to transport tea leaves, other crops, and people through the central hill.

The original vintage trains have been retired for a long time, but local life continues as before, both inside and outside the cabin. A saffron robe monk, on the outskirts of Candy, a highland town known for its Buddhist temples and lakes, is waiting under a red silk umbrella to see us from the side of the truck. And as we gain elevation, as we move out of the suburbs, other onlookers seem to be investing in our progress. Field workers stand like their magic to see us ringing and lunch bags hanging on tree branches around them.

It's not long before you pass a series of small stations painted in candy floss pink and brahmin blue. Like a platform guard dressed like a warrant-in-the-guard in bright white pants, and a station keeper in a starch khaki jacket and a manicured mustache. “I wish you all a very happy, comfortable and safe trip,” he says in the English word “Tanoy.”

After the towering Hindu temple arrives at Hatton Station, there are kaleidoscopes of colour and landscape balloons above the tin roof house. The deeper we are in the hills we go to, the more impressive the lack of development becomes. As the valley opens and reveals the ripples of the mountains that have climbed up to the tea garden, I sit in the open doorway and join the locals hanging their feet from the carriage. At the point, the leaves walls are so close that I can reach out from my seat and brush my fingers, inhaling the musty scent of the wet earth and rocks.

In addition to the hawker stream selling bags of cut guava and mangoes, curry cashew nuts and chocolate bars, there are few extra passengers to the station of Nanu Oya, a transfer hub in the nearby hill town of Nuwara Eliya. Surrounded by tea gardens, called “Little England” for its connections with British colonialists, the Georgian mansion in Nuwara Eliya covers plains of the forest of the regie-peeled eucalyptus and bushy rhododendrons. It's not visible beyond it.

Today, Nuwara Eliya is a popular base for tea estate tours and stays, making the central highlands a much-loved travel stop. Sri Lanka produces more than 300 million kilograms of tea per year, many of which have grown in the region, and its name comes from real estate that gives its founders a clue. Right after Nanu Oya, Elgin Falls is on the verge of the outside. It's an 80-foot spurt of water that looks like it's poured into the mountainside in a giant teapot. It receives the name of the tea grounds it flows. It is named after a town linked to the original planter of the Scottish town.

It is a valley of cool temperatures and humid fog that makes Sri Lanka's central highlands the fertile ground for tea plantations, but there is no sense of temperature dropping until you get close to a small station in Patipora. Here, as the clouds chase the train, a hand-drawn sign informs you that the truck's highest stop has reached at 6,225 feet. The end of my own journey comes further down the tracks at Haputor, an inconspicuous station, but for the crowd of locals who come out on the board from nowhere as I depart. With lifelines passing through the jungle, the train engines will again be generated. And like that, it's gone.

Seats from LK1,300 (£3.50).