2 days ago
The new rail journey opening up Norway's ‘heavenly' valley
According to the mother of Harry Hole, Jo Nesbø's fictional detective, God spent so much time perfecting the Norwegian valley of Romsdalen that the rest of the world had to be finished in a hurry to have it done by Sunday.
The Golden Train has been created to share its beauty with a new audience, but the name gives a clue to a darker episode in its past.
The starting point of my Nordic journey was the region's principal town, Ålesund, which, on a winter's night in 1904, was burnt to the ground, leaving 10,000 people homeless. But an architectural phoenix rose from the ashes.
Within three years it was reconstructed in the Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil, style, creating one of the finest places in Europe to appreciate this form: all Viking motifs, fancy gables and wrought-iron balconies.
A railway was supposed to link Ålesund with Åndalsnes, from which the Golden Train begins, but the construction costs through the mountainous terrain proved too daunting even for Norway, with its fabulous sovereign wealth fund.
So to reach Åndalsnes, you have to drive around Romsdalfjord or take the spectacular bus route over the rugged Ørskogfjellet – one of those roads where you are thankful not to be at the wheel, so you can enjoy the landscape.
Åndalsnes, a popular cruise port, lies almost at the head of the fjord, at the foot of Romsdalen and the mouth of the Rauma river, which the railway follows all the way to Dombas on the Oslo-Trondheim main line.
The Golden Train, with its refurbished carriages, is a revival of a 1930s service that took passengers along the most spectacular part of the railway as far as Bjorli, where a station restaurant could serve 700 passengers.
Today the train makes two daily round-trips of two and a half hours with a well-judged commentary by Aaron Johnston, a Scot from Troon who is now a local archaeologist.
The line has to climb 1,872 feet in the 36 miles to Bjorli, and features two partly tunnelled horseshoe curves and a crossing of the river by the Kylling Bridge, 200 feet above the water.
It's an extraordinary piece of railway engineering that took 12 years to build, being opened by King Haakon VII in 1924. It was dictated by the landscape, which is as spectacular as Nesbø suggests.
Trollveggen (Troll Wall) is northern Europe's highest vertical cliff face at 3,600 feet, and the Romsdalshorn mountain is wonderfully distinctive, as though a giant with an ice-cream scoop has had a go at one face.
The broad Rauma river is seldom out of view as it tumbles over rapids, its waters fed by numerous falls down the mountains that flank the valley and rise to coxcomb summits, still white with spring snow.
Those waters, Aaron tells us, have attracted fly-fishing 'salmon lords' since the 19th century. Lord Beresford and William Bromley-Davenport came in 1849 and caught over 300 salmon, to the astonishment of locals whose nets had never had such success. Bromley-Davenport so fell in love with the area that he bought a farm, still owned by the family.
As we returned after a short time at Bjorli, noting the foundations of the huge restaurant destroyed by bombs in 1940, Aaron told us the story behind the train's name.
When Germany invaded Norway in 1940, the Nazis wanted the country's king and the gold reserves. The cat-and-mouse story of how a small group eluded capture as they transported 50 tons of gold from Oslo to waiting British warships is brilliantly and faithfully told in the 2022 film Gold Run.
The railway was used between Lillehammer and Åndalsnes, where one of the three consignments, separated to reduce the risk of total loss, was loaded on to the cruiser HMS Galathea. The wooded slopes of the mountains and their steep sides helped to hide the train from German bombers while it waited for the right moment to reach Åndalsnes.
The second consignment went by lorry to Molde, where it joined the king on HMS Glasgow, and the third went by fishing boats to Tromsø and HMS Enterprise. Not a bar was lost.
Just outside Åndalsnes, I stayed at the picturesque Hotel Aak, used by 19th-century English alpinist William Cecil Slingsby when he came to Norway to climb.
He became so revered as the 'father of Norwegian mountaineering' that native climbers would visit him at his Yorkshire home in Carleton.
One of Norway's oldest tourist hotels, the Aak is now popular with walkers, and its talented chef is among the crazy BASE jumpers who fling themselves off the valley summits wearing a wing suit and parachute.
The valley is used to such extreme activity; its dramatic setting has hosted many films, including the railway bridge scene and the motorcycle jump in Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning, starring Tom Cruise, and Romsdalen stands in for The Gorge in the 2025 science fiction film.
A gentler means of reaching the summit of Nesaksla mountain is provided by the Romsdalen cable car, adjacent to Åndalsnes station and the Norwegian Mountaineering Museum, which has Norway's highest indoor climbing wall.
Nesaksla offers panoramic views up half a dozen valleys and along the fjord, and the summit's Eggen restaurant is a destination in its own right. It's easy to see why Jo Nesbø was so keen to share this heavenly corner of Norway with the world.
How to do it
Norwegian offers direct flights from Gatwick to Ålesund Vigra from £57. Hotel Aak has standard double rooms with breakfast from £210. Stays at the 1904 Hotel in Ålesund cost from £144. Tickets for the Golden Train cost from £47. See for more information.
Three more unmissable Norwegian train journeys
Bergen–Oslo
Bergen is a good place to start a Norwegian rail holiday, with direct flights from eight UK airports, and the railway line to Oslo is one of the best journeys.
There is hardly a dull moment in the seven-hour journey as the upland farming country gives way to wilder landscapes and the central plateau, so empty that the area around Finse was used for the ice planet of Hoth in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. On the descent to the capital, the train takes the beautiful Hallingdal valley, criss-crossing the river. Farms return to the landscape before the junction of Hønefoss and suburbs of Oslo.
Myrdal–Flåm
Leave the Bergen–Oslo line at Myrdal for the ride to Flåm, one of Norway's most visited cruise ports because the railway is one of the country's best-loved tourist attractions. Though only around 12 miles long, it descends 2,381ft at gradients so steep that some locomotives on the line were fitted with four brake systems.
It is the steepest standard-gauge railway in Europe and has 20 tunnels as well as snow shelters. The views over Sognefjord, Norway's deepest and longest fjord, are spectacular as the train gingerly twists down the mountainside.
Oslo–Bodø
With the first section opening in 1854 and the last in 1962, this 801-mile railway was a long time in the making. Best broken by a night or two in the old capital of Trondheim, the journey offers seascapes, mountain panoramas, desolate plateau, dark forests and some of Norway's loveliest valleys.
It's one of the few railways to penetrate the Arctic Circle, and you would be unlucky not to see reindeer, elk or musk ox at some point. It also takes you to Hell, a junction with connections for Sweden. Bodø has a huge aircraft museum, with dozens of planes including a Hurricane, and a museum of the town's past.
