Tramway du Mont-Blanc

The Tramway du Mont-Blanc is the highest rack railway in France, the Département de la Haute-Savoie says, and it was built with the summit of Mont Blanc as its goal. The line starts beside the SNCF station at Le Fayet, at 580m, climbs through Saint-Gervais-les-Bains and over the Col de Voza, and ends 12.7km and more than 1,800m of height later at the Nid d’Aigle, some 600m north of the Bionnassay glacier. The Département, its historic owner, took over running it on 18 May 2026 through a régie created for the purpose, after voting in November 2025 to end the Compagnie du Mont-Blanc’s contract early.

Its history is a contest between two valleys. Rival schemes, one favouring Chamonix and one Saint-Gervais, were argued over until the conseil général chose Henri Duportal’s plan from Le Fayet on 9 July 1904, French Wikipedia records; work ran from 1909 to 1914, by which time the rails had come within reach of the Bionnassay glacier and went no further. For more than a century the top station was a provisional one at 2,372m, until a short extension and a new station, at 2,412m and the highest in France, were finished in 2025. The line is metre gauge on a Strub rack, at gradients of up to 24 percent.

Three trains delivered in 1957 were named Marie, Jeanne and Anne after daughters of the line’s director, and the four Stadler trains delivered in 2022 carry those names again with a fourth, Marguerite. The operator lists stops at Saint-Gervais, Motivon, the Col de Voza and Bellevue, and serves the Nid d’Aigle in summer only. For climbers the Nid d’Aigle is the start of the normal route on Mont Blanc; for everyone else it is the end of the line, with the glacier and the Aiguille de Bionnassay above.

The train is for anyone who wants to stand within sight of a glacier from Saint-Gervais without walking, and for a family on a rest day. It is not the train for anyone expecting a summit at the end, since the line stops more than 2,000m below Mont Blanc; the Aiguille du Midi from Chamonix goes to 3,842m, and the Prarion walk from the Bellevue stop is a gentle way to spend the rest of the day on foot.