The Flåm railway
Published 17 September 2026
One of the world's great short train journeys
The world's great scenic railways tend to be long: days across a continent, or at least many hours through changing landscape. The Flåm railway is neither. It runs for twenty kilometres, takes about an hour, and climbs — or descends, depending on which way you are travelling — 866 metres between the high mountain junction of Myrdal and the fjord village of Flåm. Clients who have crossed Siberia by rail or ridden the length of India sometimes ask, reasonably, whether an hour-long branch line in Norway can possibly be worth the detour.
The short answer is yes — and the reasons are specific rather than sentimental. This is one of the steepest standard-gauge railways in the world, built by hand through terrain that most engineers of the 1920s would have judged impossible, and it compresses into sixty minutes a cross-section of Norwegian landscape — gorge, waterfall, farmed valley floor, fjord — that would otherwise take a full day of driving to see. It is not a long journey. It is an extremely concentrated one.
The client who treats the Flåm railway as a box to tick between Bergen and the airport sees a pleasant train ride. The client whose day has been built around it — the right connection, the right time of year, a night in Flåm or Aurland rather than a rushed turnaround — has one of the most complete short experiences Norway offers. The difference lies entirely in how the day is planned.
The engineering is the first reason it is worth doing
The Flåm line was built between 1923 and 1940, largely by hand, through a valley — the Flåmsdalen — that drops from 867 metres above sea level at Myrdal to 2 metres at Flåm in a horizontal distance of only 20 kilometres. Most of the route runs on a gradient of around 5.5 per cent, or 1 in 18, which makes it one of the steepest standard-gauge (non-rack) railways operating anywhere in the world. There are twenty tunnels along the line, eighteen of which were dug by hand with pickaxes rather than machinery, including one that turns a full 180 degrees inside the mountain to lose height without the gradient becoming unworkable. This is not scenery laid over an ordinary railway; the railway itself is the achievement, and riding it is the most direct way to understand what building a line through this landscape actually required.
What an hour on board actually shows you
The train descends from Myrdal's bare, high-mountain plateau into the narrowing Flåmsdalen valley, past farms clinging to impossibly steep valley sides, through birch forest and alongside the Flåm river as it drops in a series of rapids and falls. Roughly halfway down, the train stops for about five minutes at Kjosfossen, where the waterfall crashes down 225 metres a short walk from the platform; in the summer season a folklore performance — a costumed Huldra, the seductive forest spirit of Norwegian legend — is staged on the rocks as the train pulls in, a theatrical touch that particularly newer visitors to Norway tend to remember long after the more obviously impressive engineering has faded. By the time the valley opens out at Flåm, you are at sea level, on the edge of the Aurlandsfjord, having passed through a genuinely different landscape to the one you left less than an hour before.
Being short is precisely the point, not a limitation
An hour is not a compromise here; it is the correct length for what the railway is designed to show. Norway's classic long-distance lines — the Bergen Railway across the Hardangervidda plateau, or the Nordland line into the Arctic Circle — earn their length by crossing genuinely vast, slowly changing terrain, and they reward travellers who want that scale. The Flåm railway does the opposite: it compresses an extreme change in altitude and landscape into the smallest possible space, which is exactly why the gradient had to be so severe and the tunnels so numerous. Judged as a long-distance train journey, an hour is nothing. Judged as a demonstration of what Norwegian engineers achieved in a single valley, it is exactly enough.
The day around it matters more than the hour itself
The Flåm railway is almost always one part of a longer day rather than a destination in its own right, and this is where its real value lies. The classic routing links the main Bergen Railway — itself crossing the Hardangervidda, Europe's largest high mountain plateau — with the descent to Flåm, and then a cruise along the Aurlandsfjord and the Nærøyfjord, a UNESCO World Heritage-listed arm of the Sognefjord narrow enough in places for the mountainsides to feel close enough to touch. Taken together, this single day moves you from high mountain plateau to steep railway to fjord cruise to, typically, Bergen itself — a more complete cross-section of western Norway's geography than almost any other day trip in the country offers
How to do it well, rather than how most people do it
The Flåm railway is also one of Norway's most visited attractions, and in the height of summer, when cruise ships call at Flåm and coach parties are timed around the same connections, it can feel considerably less exclusive than the landscape it passes through deserves. For well-travelled clients who want the experience without the crowd, the difference is almost entirely in the planning: travelling in late spring or early autumn rather than July and August, timing the journey away from the principal cruise-ship call times, and — where the season and connections allow — building in a night in Flåm or Aurland itself rather than treating it as a same-day connection between Oslo and Bergen. A night in the valley also allows an early or late departure on a quieter service, and the chance to walk part of the old construction road above Flåm, which very few day visitors ever see.
Where it sits within a wider Norway itinerary
We rarely book the Flåm railway as a stand-alone excursion; it is almost always a connecting piece within a longer touring holiday. On our Oslo, the Sognefjord and Bergen touring holiday it forms the link between the capital and Bergen by way of Balestrand. On the Grand rail tour of Norway it is one of several signature lines, alongside the Dovre and Nordland railways, within a much longer exploration of the country. And on itineraries that also take in Trondheim or the Hurtigruten coastal route, it typically opens or closes the western leg of the trip. In each case, the railway itself takes an hour — but it is the reason the rest of that day's routing exists.
For almost any client visiting the fjords of western Norway, or routing between Oslo and Bergen by land, the Flåm railway is worth doing: it is quick, logistically simple to build into an itinerary, and delivers scenery and engineering interest out of proportion to the hour it takes. The exception is the client who has already committed several days to a quieter, more remote fjord experience — Geiranger, the Lofoten Islands, or a private boat charter on the Hardangerfjord, for instance — and is looking to avoid anything with a fixed timetable or a shared platform. For that traveller, the honest advice is that the railway is a genuinely good experience rather than an essential one.
Planning a Flåm railway holiday with Expressions Holidays
Every itinerary we build around the Flåm railway is designed around the specific brief — the timing that avoids the busiest connections, the choice between a same-day link and a night in the valley, and the wider routing through Norway that the railway sits within. The sample itineraries on our Norway and rail holiday pages are a starting point for a conversation rather than a fixed product.
To begin planning, call us on 01392 441245 Monday to Friday 9am to 5.30pm, Saturday 10am to 2pm, or email info@expressionsholidays.co.uk.
