The Flåm Railway Museum.

Welcome to The Flåm Railway Museum. The Flåm Valley and the little village of Flåm has a history that stretches back thousands of years, and during your visit we want to take you on a journey through this history – with extra focus on the development of the Flåm Railway and why it is so important for our local culture and history. The Flåm Valley and Sognefjord was shaped by several ice ages over two million years and by rivers and weathering in interglacial times. The highest mountain tops became visible from the icecap 15-16 000 years ago and the last side valleys melted away 11 000 years ago. There are written records of farming in Flåm as early as the 1300s, but there were most likely permanent settlements in the Flåm Valley for at least 2000 years. The oldest settlements, from late Iron Age, seems to have been farms at Fretheim and Flåm, and they are still in operation. Several of the farms were deserted for a long time, after the Black Plague in the mid-1300s, but tax records from the 1500s refers to 6 farms, a population of about 80 and tough living conditions. Census from the mid-1800s refer to 634 residents in the Flåm Valley, whereupon 1/3 of the population of Aurland emigrated to the United States, as all land was in use and the valley could not feed more people.