Extreme Railway Journeys - Riding the Flåmsbanen

Until the middle of the 20th century, the only way you could get to Flåm was either by boat or by horse over these terrifying mountain passes. But then at the end of the Second World War, they opened up what's now become very well known as the Flåm Railway or Flåmbanner. These days, this railway is one of Norway's biggest tourist attractions, carrying nearly a million people a year. It's worth mentioning the train early this morning broke down. It could not get through thick snow, and that doesn't happen very often in Norway. So in an ideal world, this one will go all the way to the top. Oh, I cut that fine. We're off. This is one of the steepest railways in the world. We go up 3,000 feet in just 50 minutes, so it's pretty sharp. But the views are supposed to be absolutely fantastic. It's the perfect way to start my winter wonderland tour of Scandinavia. It's only going to get tougher from here. This is the first big snow of the winter here in Norway. Look at that valley. Just stunning. It's really quiet as well, like the train's just padding along in the snow. After a 50-year wait, construction of the Flormsbanner began in 1924. But it was still underway when the Second World War broke out. It's only 12 miles, but now I've started to travel up this, you realize why it took such a long time to build. It must have been so tough. It was built by around 200 itinerant workers known as rallars. Just imagine building a railway through this. Thick rock, all sorts of problems from avalanches, and also because they were just using very basic picks, shovels, lots of problems doing the actual work, but also because they were doing so much dynamite blasting. Years later, many of them died from silicosis. Progress was slow. They had to build 20 tunnels, which made up nearly a third of the length of the line. The whole community got involved, with local carriage owners transporting tourists by day and construction materials by night. But by 1940, the line was still not complete when Nazi Germany invaded Norway. They wanted control of the North Sea coast and these strategically important fjords where warships and U-boats could hide and be resupplied. By summer 1940, the Germans had occupied the whole of Norway, but it turned out to be a good time for this particular railway because of its access to the fjords. So they trebled the workforce and got the railway completed in a matter of months. And they even made use of a local power source, the Kioskfossen waterfall. Absolutely breathtaking waterfall. The tourists, you can see, all love it, but also the Germans loved it as a source of hydroelectricity. And it shows how important this railway line was to them that in 1944, they electrified this railway line. The Floms-Banners train remains state-of-the-art. They have to be to run throughout the winter on this steep, dangerous line. It goes up and goes down at 5.5%. Now, that is very, very sharp, and no train really likes that, particularly going down. They've got five separate braking systems, air brakes, you name it, every sort of brake. And I really like the idea of us having all those brakes because otherwise this could be a remake of the runaway train. In reality, we've arrived at the top safe and sound.