I'm Off My Beaten Track in Flam ...

… As the weather here in the UK turns especially wintry this week, I’ve been going through my journal from my Norway trip. Read on as I take a little train journey …

NORWAY NOTES

The boat is parked in the sound at Flam. I’m here to take one of the most scenic rail trips in the whole of northern Europe. I’m a little sceptical because I’ve spent so much time exploring the Cévennes. But I always like to make up my own mind. So, I’m setting off today with all pre-conceptions set to one side.

Before I left the boat, I checked the map. Here in Flam, we are about 2 meters above MSL – that’s the Mean Sea Level, and we are 60.77 degrees north of the equator. That’s a whole 0.7 degrees further north than Lerwick and just 5.3 degrees south of the Arctic Circle. When I left home in Yorkshire, the cherry tree had already flowered, the fuschia was beginning to come into bud, and the landscape was lush and green.

Here, the lush grass is pale, and the meadow flowers that I expect to see in April and May at home are struggling to make their presence felt. The temperature is about 8 degrees centigrade, and I’m wearing my big fleece. I shove my hands in my pockets and remind myself that although the calendar says it's mid-May, the weather believes it’s February!

The train comes into the station. It’s not a tourist train. This stretch of railway is part of the main line to Bergen. It just crosses the seriously big hills that seem to cover the whole of Scandinavia. As the engine begins its return journey we leave behind the trappings of Norwegian early spring and gradually move up into winter.

This leg of the journey to Myrdal is 20.2 kilometres in length. What makes this stretch so fascinating is that across that distance, the train will rise from sea level to 866 meters in height. If you prefer old measures, that’s 2,841 feet above sea level. As a comparison, Bowfell North Top in Cumbria is of an equivalent height. As the train snakes along and back on itself as we make the 1:15 climb, I wonder if there’s snow on top of Bowfell.

A Danish man and his wife are my fellow passengers. He explains the difficulties of engineering in managing such a climb. Some of the detail is far too technical for me, but there is one particular fact that gets through the fog and into my conscious mind. Underground in mines, the limit for gradients is 1:15. Anything in excess of that means whatever piece of steel you're driving down becomes a sledge! I ponder this for a moment and then take out my free leaflet and search for the piece of info I had read before getting off the boat. The maximum gradient on this bit of the Bergen-Oslo line is 1:18. I smile at Mr Denmark and thank him for the information. I turn to look out of the window, and those numbers keep going around in my head. ‘Just hope this thing has got good brakes’, I murmur to myself.

As we progress, the lakes look colder and greyer. The next one has ice floes at the edges. The one after is almost solid ice. The trees get more sparse, and the silver birch have not a single leaf in bud, they are reminiscent of early winter. As we approach Myrdal, snow clings to every surface, the solid white of the ground challenging the deep grey of the heavy cloud above. Just before we pull into the station, the sky releases its cargo of sleet and snow. From a mild, late spring in Yorkshire a few days ago, I’ve travelled back to mid-winter …

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to read my two earlier posts about  Bergen  and  Eidfjord