Lac d’Artouste highest train in Europe.

When you get up in the morning and the mist is all around and you wonder why you’ve booked a trip into the mountains! However, after 10 minutes on a cable car you find yourself in the sun with the clouds below you. Followed by 50 minutes on a single track rail journey, culminating in a 25 minute walk/climb to a dizzy height of 2,000m to reach your goal, Lac d’Artouste! Feeling quite emotional after an amazing day.

A bit of background info:

Train d'Artouste was originally built to shuttle labourers and equipment, not tourists. At the end of the 19th Century, a priest and scientist who studied glaciers discovered Artouste, a glacial lake that had remained hidden deep within the mountains. Soon after, an ambitious idea was hatched to build a dam and harness the lake for hydroelectric power. Yet, facilitating access to this remote water source required building a railroad that could ferry both people and materials to the construction site.

When construction began in 1921, some 2,000 men – mostly Spanish workers from across the border – used dynamite and pickaxes to blast tunnels and chip away at the limestone and granite rock face. The final track was laid in 1924 and carried goods and workers to and from the construction site for the next five years, where labourers toiled year-round in harsh conditions: one man was killed when a cable broke and decapitated him.

The tracks were hastily dismantled once the dam was inaugurated in 1929, only to be rebuilt after operators realised they still needed it to maintain the dam (the train is still used for maintenance work today). But the local prefecture saw much more potential. By 1932, the construction of a gondola below and several new coats of paint turned an industrial train into a shiny new tourist attraction. The late 1960s saw the inauguration of the Artouste ski station, and in 1984, the Artouste-Fabrèges resort village opened a short walk from the gondola, attracting a steady stream of visitors to the train.