Norwegian Trains

After yesterday’s 10-hour marathon from Bodø to Trondheim, the 7-hour train trip to Oslo seems like a piece of cake.  There are a few things that make these long trips tolerable—one is gorgeous scenery.  Another is that a “Komfort Klass” upgrade only costs the equivalent of three cups of coffee…and there’s a hot drinks machine in the middle of the car.  With coffee, cappucino, hot chocolate, it doesn’t take long to drink up the extra fee.  Plus, the seats are generously-spaced and comfortable:

(Brief sweater update…there was JUST enough of the dark brown yarn!  Work can continue today and the next few days!)

The town of Bodø:

Now, on to the scenery:

Many of these pictures were taken when the train from Bodø to Trondheim was above or near timberline (roughly 600 meters), others when the train was near sea level, sometimes only 4-5 m.o.h. (that is, meters above sea level).

There’s a marker when you cross the Arctic Circle.  We’ve been up there for 10 days.

At lots of places in Sweden and Norway one sees rows of little red buildings along the shore. They are boat storage sheds. Often they have a pair of rails going from down in the water to inside the hut – they are for moving the boat between shed and water.

We are actually writing the above part of this post while on the train to Oslo. Now we are in our hotel in Oslo and adding pics from Trondheim to Oslo train trip. The downhill ski area is at or near Oppdal. The grey stone building is the old Oppdal railroad station, now a hotel. Not all rural farm buildings in Norway are the standard red with white trim – here is a small collection of some of the more scenic non-red ones.

Here is a picture of a glacial cirque/hanging valley. We have seen many of these on Lofoten, and in both northern Sweden and Norway – this is one of the more striking examples from Norway. In all cases these cirques/hanging valleys are more recent additions to mountains already rounded and smoothed by continental glaciers, pointing to a later, cold period, when snow fall supported valley glaciers but not still another episode of continental glaciation.

Brief update on an earlier part of this post: the extra train fee isn’t quite so worth it when the coffee machine isn’t working, and they don’t tell you that you can get your free coffee by taking your ticket to the café car until you’re only an hour from the end of the trip.