One of our excursions was titled, “Norway in a Nutshell”. Of course like everything else it involved a ferry and 2 hour coach journey to get there. The coach took us to Flåm where we had time to get coffee before catching our train up into the mountains to Myrdal station, some 22Km away and 867 m above sea level. This is one of the steepest railway journeys in the world with 80% of it having a gradient of 5.5° or about 1:18
We were lucky as not only was it early in the season but there were no cruise ships in town, so the train was quite quiet and we had a whole carriage to our party and not just the booked seats. Booked parties have their own section of the platform to board on accessed via its own gate, the carriages ahead of us were actually all empty and locked.
The internals of the carriages look quite old but I get the feeling it may be reproduction, I am not sure on that one, unfortunately they had very few opening windows so photographs taken on the journey suffer from reflections.
The carriages themselves have the route painted on the side and the engines have local scenes painted on them.
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Not only is the line steep but its quite twisty doing a 180° turn in one of the tunnels so when you come out you are traveling in the opposite direction, There are also snow shelters on parts where it runs along the edge of the mountain to allow avalanches to flow over the track rather than destroy it. Before they could build the railway they actually had to build a road, this is now used for hiking and cycling. As this is a single line, approximately half way up there is a passing loop where we had to wait for a train coming down
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There is a myth that a hulder lives in the mountains, this is a lady like a siren and her dancing can draw men away never to be seen again. She is said to live at Kjosfossen ,up near a very large waterfall close to the railway. The train stops by the waterfall at a specifically constructed platform so that passengers can alight and watch the hulder dancing in the spray.
We stopped here both on the way up as well as our return journey down.
Once back down at Flåm we visited the Flåm railway museum which is free to enter. Amongst the exhibits were these machines to run on the railway track for the maintenance men to get about. The first one is unpowered and they were taken to the top by train and then the chaps freewheeled back down to where they were needed, unfortunately due to the gradient the speeds were quite impressive and several died in accidents before they were withdrawn.
They also had a model of the actual station
We then took the opportunity of having a bit of lunch at one of the many fast food outlets, after an all you can eat breakfast and before an all you can eat dinner we didn’t need much to keep us going. Once that was sorted it was a boat trip on two Fjords, the Nærøyfjord and the Aurlandsfjord.
The boat was again a state of the art electric cruise boat with internal seating table and panoramic windows, a small bow deck and side decks that ran at an angle from one level to the next, so no external stair ways. It carried about 400 people when full, but again with no cruise ship in and early in the season it was quiet. We boarded the vessel and were soon saying goodbye to Flåm as we wouldn’t be returning but getting off at Gudvangen where our coach would be waiting for us to take us home.
As well as the external walkways there was a reasonable top deck space and with the improvement in the weather is was quite a nice spot for sight seeing and the sights were spectacular. none of these photo do them justice.
Unlike the electric ferries we have been going back and forth on with the coach this electric boat just had a big plug on a cable to charge the batteries that needed manually connecting.
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At Gudvangen there was a cargo ship loading with anorthosite, which looked like finely crushed white rock. This is used to make mineral wool for insulation. The bucket loader on top of the heap puts in into perspective.
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