Today we are full of excitement because we’re on the Flam Railway train heading over what is absolutely up there in the list of beautiful scenic places.

INFO from the http://www.visitflam.com website:
In the span of a brief hour, the train takes you from sea level at the Sognefjord in Flåm to the Myrdal mountain station at 867 metres above sea level. Myrdal is also a station on the Bergen Railway, which means that the Flåm Railway connects with trains running between Bergen and Oslo. For information on and tickets for connecting services on the Bergen Line, please visit NSB’s website: www.nsb.no 

The Flåm Railway is one of the steepest standard-gauge railway lines in the world, with 80% of the journey at a gradient of 5.5%. The train runs through spectacular scenery, alongside the Rallar Road, vertiginous mountainsides, foaming waterfalls, through 20 tunnels and offers so many viewpoints that, for many people, a single trip up and down is not enough.

National Geographic Traveler Magazine calls the Flåm Railway one of the top 10 train journeys in Europe while in 2014 Lonely Planet Traveller went even further, and named it the best train journeys in the world.

This is the original 21 hairpin turn road that was the only way into the fjord besides viking ship.

Along the railway line, in between two tunnels where the front and the rear of the train were still inside…..

there’s this viewing platform with the most lovely waterfall.  They stop the train for about 5 minutes so you can get out and take photos. This little lady couldn’t wait and had her camera stretched out as she alighted.

Me Jenny and I stayed snuggled up on the train and viewed it from the window.

and on the other side of the train from that waterfall was this gorgeous view of this old water pumping station back by the snow capped mountain – quite beautiful.

57 minutes from start to end and we were dropped off at this deserted station at Myrdal.

We waited as the Flamsbana switched ends and returned back to Flam…

… while we were left to fend for ourselves for about 40 minutes with very limited resources.

But the train was there right on time and we were whisked though a whole host of landscapes that we weren’t expecting…. check out the snow!  And see the rippled part on the water? – That’s ice!

The train journey from Myrdal to Oslo took about five hours, so we sat back and watched the scenery change from waterfalls, to frozen lakes to snowed in towns to moonscape rocky fields and as we got closer to the big smoke, the towns got bigger.

Our hotel was not too far from the train station, but also wasn’t surrounded by restaurants, so we headed downstairs to the hotel restaurant which was a quaint little maze of rooms and at the end…. a little bar.

This is the hotel lift – how cool.

The restaurant offered a 5 course Japanese tasting menu

which was a lovely surprise…. but if I’m honest, we were so hungry, we would’ve eaten anything!