The highest rail route in northern Europe

On a chilly November morning in Oslo, I boarded a train bound for Bergen.

I’ve been exploring Norway for more than a decade, returning at least a dozen times since my wide-eyed first trip. I have been to the northernmost point on the Norwegian mainland (Knivskjelodden) and to its southernmost tip (Lindesnes Fyr, where my sunglasses blew clean off my head and out to sea in a gale). I have seen whales and walrus. I have hiked across glaciers in Svalbard and stood beneath the country’s only palm tree in Kristiansand. And I have watched the northern lights in winter and partied beneath the midnight sun in summer.

But for reasons passing all understanding, I had never before travelled the Oslo-Bergen railway. The more I thought about it, the stranger this seemed. This is, after all, ranked regularly among the world’s most beautiful train journeys. It was time – even long overdue.

I had done my research. I knew, for example, that on a short November day, only one of the five daily departure times, 08:25, would ensure that I made the entire six-and-a-half-hour, 496km journey during daylight hours. I knew enough also to book a window seat on the left side of the train (on the right if travelling from Bergen) to get the best views.

And when the train pulled away from the platform, I felt suddenly that, without realising it until now, I had been waiting for this moment for a very long time.

At first, there was nothing to suggest the drama that lay up ahead. As the train sped away from the city centre, there were fleeting glimpses: of the pleasure craft of Oslofjord; of elegant wooden homes climbing hillsides; of signs to Bygdøy where museums told epic stories of exploration and the Viking past. Gathering speed out past Asker and Sandvika, the train then crossed the fjord and hurried past the burgeoning commuter city of Drammen, its hills colonised by urban sprawl of the prettiest kind.

Not far west of Drammen, the track turned for the north. So expertly has this track been engineered that the change in direction barely registered. One minute we were travelling west, the next we were bound for the north and it was left to the landscape itself to announce the change: all of a sudden, the hills were higher, and pristine alpine meadows and pine-clad foothills scaled deep valleys studded with small villages and lone farmhouses clinging to precipices.

Change came gradually. The slowing train hinted at subtle gains in altitude. We entered a valley down by the shore of a pretty fjord. When we left, it was across a pass high above the valley floor; looking back to where we began, it all looked so terribly far down below.

And then, without clear warning, we emerged from a tunnel and into the high snows of Hardangervidda, a vast mountain plateau. “I love watching people’s faces when they travel this route for the first time,” Jørgen Johansen told me. Johansen has worked the line for Norway’s rail authorities for more than three decades. “I never get tired of the view, but it’s the look of wonder on people’s faces that I enjoy the most.”

With the train now atop Europe’s largest high plateau – Hardangervidda covers nearly 6,500 sq km, with an average elevation of more than 1km above sea level – the journey became something different altogether. For the first time, it rang true that this was both northern Europe’s highest mainline railway and a marvel of engineering.

One of the oldest geological formations on the continent’s north, Hardangervidda and its valleys and contours were shaped over millennia by glaciers gouging down off the icy wastes towards the sea. And yet, what took thousands of years under the weight of ice and the inexorable march of time, Norway’s rail and road builders accomplished in decades.

BBC