Montenvers Railway (Chamonix)

The little red rack train from Chamonix exists for a single view: the Mer de Glace, the "sea of ice" that pours down from the heart of the Mont Blanc massif. At roughly 7.5 km, and far longer when its feeding glaciers are counted, it is the largest glacier in France, and in the eighteenth century it was already the destination of travellers who rode mules up the slope to Montenvers to stare at a surface one visitor compared to storm waves frozen in an instant. The railway replaced the mules: the first section, to Caillet, opened in 1908 and the full line in 1909.

The line is 5.1 km of metre-gauge track using the Strub rack system, with gradients between 11 and 22 per cent. Steam worked it for its first half-century; it was electrified in 1954. Trains climb at 14 to 20 km/h and cover the ascent from Chamonix, at about 1,035 m, to Montenvers station at 1,913 m in around twenty minutes, winding through larch and spruce forest and across a viaduct before emerging onto a balcony high above the ice. The line has had a darker chapter too: in August 1927 a train derailed on the Montenvers viaduct, killing fifteen people.

At the top, the scene is at once grand and sobering. The glacier lies hundreds of metres below the terrace, grey with rock debris, and the glacier has visibly thinned within living memory — from 1939 to 2001 it lost about 30 cm of thickness a year. A small cable car and a staircase of some 170 steps lead down to the ice cave, carved afresh into the glacier each season, and the Glaciorium explains glaciology and climate change in the landscape where the evidence is plainest. The Montenvers refuge, with twenty rooms, lets visitors stay on after the last train has gone down.

Getting there

The lower station is in Chamonix itself; the nearest town listed as a regional centre is Sallanches, about 19 km down the Arve valley. The closest airport by distance is Annecy (NCY), about 60 km away, but most visitors fly into Geneva (GVA), roughly 100 km by road from Chamonix — about an hour to an hour and a half by car or by the direct airport bus.