On Friday, 27 November, more than 1.2 million Norwegians watched parts of “Bergensbanen” on the Norwegian television channel, NRK2. This is an astonishing fact because this means that more than 25% of the country watched this one television show on that one day.
What was it? A production of NRKBeta made to celebrate the 100th birthday of Bergensbanen in 2009, the video shows every minute a rail journey that has been named one of the top 10 in the world — the scenic train ride between Bergen, a major city on the Norwegian west coast, and crossing the mountains to Norway's capital city of Oslo. The views are amazing — they simply mounted a camera on the front of the locomotive and took off!
Best of all, NRK has chosen to release it as a free and legally downloadable single video file on NRKBeta's web site.
Here is a 10 minute clip from the full presentation. It is the section of the journey starting at the Finse station — the highest point on the entire Norwegian railway system. This is the area of Norway that was used to film the scene on the planet "Hoth" for the Star Wars films.
The original showing of the video included music and interviews as well as clips and pictures from the history of the railroad. However, due to copyright issues, NRK could not include those.
Frankly, I think the video is better for it because it is simply the journey itself, with onboard announcements and indications of the names and lengths of the many tunnels along the route that help to make the route an engineering achievement in its own right.
When the video first aired on NRK in Norway, there were more than 1,000 tweets with the hashtag #bergensbanen. A second broadcast brought even more tweets.
And NRK will broadcast the journey again on December 26 beginning at 10:27 a.m. — the same time that the train leaves Bergen. But now anyone can download the file and enjoy it anytime.
For people who love travel, rail journies, scenery, etc. this is an experience not to be missed. You may not find anything better for a long time. Tusen takk til NRK Beta for providing such a wonderful journey!
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Thanks to the CC-license provided with the video from NRK, I’ve made a time-laps video of it that is only 7 minutes and 14 seconds long. You can watch it on my blog:
http://blog.technofranki.net/2009/12/24/bergensbanen-in-only-7-minutes-and-14-seconds/
.-= Frank Eivind´s last blog ..Black Friday on Amazon.com =-.
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