Flåm Railway
Myrdal to Flåm

Myrdal is not a destination. It is a junction - a cluster of buildings at 867 metres above sea level where the Bergen Railway pauses and the Flåmsbana begins. There is a small station building, a café, and that is approximately everything. The purpose of the place is departure.

The Bergen Railway arrives from the west (from Bergen, a two-hour journey across the Hardangervidda plateau) and continues east toward Oslo. At Myrdal, the Flåmsbana peels off southward and begins an immediate descent into the Flåm valley. The change from the bleak plateau landscape of the Bergen Railway to the enclosed, forested valley below is extraordinary - it happens within minutes of leaving Myrdal.

The plateau at Myrdal feels like the top of the world. Within ten minutes, you are deep inside a mountain valley with waterfalls on all sides.

Roughly halfway down the valley, the train does something unusual: it stops, and the doors open. Not at a station - at a waterfall. Kjosfossen falls 225 metres in an unbroken cascade directly beside the railway line, and the Flåmsbana has, since the early days of the route, built a platform here so passengers can step out and stand in the spray.

The stop lasts approximately five minutes. In that time, the waterfall entirely overwhelms the senses - the volume of water, the noise, the cold air pushed outward from the falling column. It is the most dramatic planned stop on any railway in Scandinavia. In summer, the platform fills immediately; find a position quickly, as the doors close and the train continues without warning.

The train stops beside a 225-metre waterfall and opens its doors. Five minutes, then it continues. No other railway in northern Europe does this.

The descent continues after Kjosfossen through a series of tunnels and spiral loops cut directly into the mountainside - the engineers of the 1920s and 1930s who built this line had no choice but to spiral the track inside the mountain to achieve a safe gradient. In several places the train completes a full circle inside a tunnel, emerging at a different level. The passengers rarely notice.

The train arrives at Flåm at two metres above sea level. The fjord is directly outside the station building - not a short walk away, not a transfer: the fjord. The Aurlandsfjord, a branch of the Sognefjord (the longest and deepest fjord in the world), is visible from the platform. The village has a population of around 350. You have just descended 864 metres in an hour.

The Nærøyfjord - the narrowest arm of the Sognefjord, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005 - is accessible from Flåm by ferry. The fjord cruise takes approximately two hours to Gudvangen, passing cliffs that rise 1,400 metres almost directly from the waterline. The cruise runs year-round, though summer sailings are more frequent.

The most common mistake on the Flåm Railway is to treat it as a day-trip component and rush back on the afternoon return. Stay a night. The village empties after the last fjord cruise; by evening it is quiet in the way that only very small places on the edge of very large water are quiet. The Aurlandsfjord at dusk, with the valley walls turning dark above - that is the reason to linger.