Rail and River: Combining a Train Journey with Your River Cruise

Why Rail and River Are Natural Complements

The rail journey and the river cruise share a philosophy of travel that distinguishes them from all faster forms: they move at a pace that allows the landscape to be experienced rather than crossed. The specific pleasure of watching countryside unfold from a train window at 40 miles per hour — the villages, the agricultural patterns, the mountain profiles, the changing geology — is related to but distinct from the specific pleasure of watching the same landscape from a river cruise ship at 8 knots.

The two formats also serve the landscape in complementary directions. Rail journeys typically traverse landscapes in cross-section — crossing mountain ranges, connecting coastal cities, moving perpendicular to the valleys that define the terrain. River journeys move along the valleys themselves, following the watercourses that the railway climbs above. The combination of the two perspectives — the valley from the rail crossing the ridge, and the valley from the water moving through it — produces a depth of landscape understanding that neither mode provides independently.

The practical travel planning implication: rail journeys work best as pre- or post-cruise components, providing both transportation between airports and cruise embarkation cities and the scenic journey that's itself part of the experience. The traveler who takes the Flåm Railway from Myrdal to Flåm as the arrival component of a Norwegian fjords cruise has begun the fjord experience before they board the ship.

Norway: The Flåm Railway and the Fjords

The Flåm Railway

The Flåm Railway (Flåmsbana) — descending 20 kilometers from Myrdal (the mountain station of the Bergen Railway) to Flåm (the fjord village at the inner end of the Aurlandsfjord) — is one of the steepest standard-gauge railways in the world, dropping 866 meters in 20 kilometers through a landscape of extraordinary vertical drama: waterfalls, snow tunnels, and the specific quality of emerging from a high mountain snowscape into the green warmth of a fjord valley floor within the space of an hour.

The Flåm Railway connects perfectly with both Norwegian fjord small ship cruises (Flåm is a port of call for most Norwegian fjord itineraries) and with the Bergen Railway's transverse crossing of the Hardangervidda plateau between Oslo and Bergen — one of the finest mountain railway journeys in Europe and a standard pre- or post-cruise component for Norwegian fjord travelers arriving from Oslo.

The Bergen Railway and the Hardangervidda

The Bergen Railway (Bergensbanen) — crossing the Norwegian mountain plateau between Oslo and Bergen at elevations approaching 1,300 meters — is the northern European mountain train journey that most consistently satisfies the expectation that the landscape description creates. The seven-hour journey crosses the Hardangervidda (the largest mountain plateau in Northern Europe), passes through a landscape of frozen lakes and tundra in winter and a rolling high-altitude wilderness of extraordinary wildness in summer, and arrives in Bergen — the gateway city for Norwegian fjord cruises — through the dramatic last descent from the mountains to the coast. Arriving in Bergen by train, then boarding a small ship for the fjord voyage, creates a journey arc that begins in one extraordinary landscape and deepens into another.

Alaska: The White Pass Railway and the Inside Passage

For Alaska small ship travelers, the most directly integrated rail-and-cruise combination is the White Pass and Yukon Route narrow-gauge railway from Skagway. Built during the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush to ascend the Chilkoot Pass route that the prospectors climbed on foot, the historic narrow-gauge railway runs from the Inside Passage port of Skagway up the steep coastal mountains and into the Yukon interior, and is one of the most scenic short railway journeys in North America.

The standard format: the small ship calls at Skagway, guests board the White Pass railway for the pass crossing and return, and the combination of the ship's channel approach to Skagway and the railway's mountain ascent provides the most complete Alaska landscape experience available in a single day. For travelers who want a longer pre- or post-cruise rail component, Rocky Mountaineer's Pacific Northwest and Canadian Rockies routes can be combined with Alaska Inside Passage cruises through Vancouver or Seattle embarkations, providing a multi-day rail prelude or postscript to the ocean voyage.

Switzerland: The Glacier Express and the Douro

The Glacier Express — connecting St. Moritz and Zermatt over a roughly 8-hour route through the Swiss Alps — is the most celebrated scenic train journey in Europe and the one whose combination with a subsequent (or preceding) Douro Valley river cruise creates the most geographically dramatic contrasts available in a two-week European itinerary. The Alps and the terraced wine valleys of northern Portugal represent the extreme ends of the European landscape range, and experiencing both in the same two weeks — the vertical drama of the Glacier Express followed by the horizontal beauty of the Douro — creates a journey with a specifically European completeness.

The practical routing: fly into Zurich or Geneva, take the Glacier Express to Zermatt or St. Moritz, continue westward by rail through Geneva to Paris for the flight south to Porto, embark on the Douro. The multi-modal complexity is manageable and, for travelers who specifically value slow travel in multiple modes, produces a journey with an organizing rhythm that no single-mode trip can achieve.

Japan and the Mekong: A Two-Continent Slow Travel Itinerary

The combination of Japan's Shinkansen network (the finest high-speed rail system in the world, connecting Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima, and beyond in a service of extraordinary punctuality and comfort) with a subsequent Southeast Asian river cruise creates one of the most compelling multi-destination, multi-mode itineraries available.

The standard routing: 7 to 10 days in Japan using the JR Pass to access the Shinkansen network freely — Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima, Nara — followed by a connection to Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, or Siem Reap, and onward to a Mekong River expedition aboard one of the current premium Mekong operators: AmaWaterways' AmaDara, Aqua Expeditions' Aqua Mekong, or one of Pandaw's restored Mekong vessels. (Pandaw's Myanmar/Irrawaddy operations have been suspended since the 2021 coup, with the company's Southeast Asia program now focused on the Mekong, the Red River, and Halong Bay; we'll re-recommend Burma when the operating environment changes.) The contrast between Japan's disciplined modernity and the Mekong's ancient cultural continuity creates a journey with an intellectual tension that both enriches and contextualizes the specific character of each destination.

Tauck: The Integrated Rail-River Specialist

Tauck's rail-and-river combination programs — which fully integrate the train journey and the river cruise into a single managed package with all logistics, transfers, guides, and inclusions handled as a unified program — are the most seamlessly executed multi-modal travel experiences we recommend. The Tauck approach eliminates the planning complexity of building a rail-river combination independently and provides the quality guarantee of a single operator's standards applied throughout the journey.

Tauck rail-river programs include combinations of European river cruises with Alpine train journeys, Alaska cruises with rail components, and multi-continent itineraries that use both rail and river as primary travel modes. For travelers who want the multi-modal experience without the planning burden of constructing it independently, Tauck's integrated programs represent the most consistently excellent option.

Related reading

• Norway and the Fjords by Small Ship
• Alaska Small Ship Cruises: The Complete Insider Guide
• Southeast Asia River Cruises: Mekong & Irrawaddy
• Douro Valley River Cruise Guide: Portugal's Wine Country by Water