Åndalsnes Station

Historie

Åndalsnes Station is a railway station in the town of Åndalsnes, the administrative centre of Rauma Municipality in Møre og Romsdal county, Norway. It has been the terminal station of the Rauma Line since the line was extended to Åndalsnes on 30 November 1924. The station was designed by Gudmund Hoel and is located on reclaimed land along the Isfjorden. To get the line to the station, a cutting had to be built. In addition to a station building, the station has an engine shed and a bus station; the station building is next to a cruise ship port. It serves four passenger trains per day, and has correspondence by bus onwards to the nearby towns of Molde and Ålesund. The station is manned and features a chapel within a retired train carriage.HistoryThe area where the station is located is built on reclaimed land, as the Åndalsnes side of Isfjorden is sufficiently shallow. The earthwork for the reclaiming was taken from a cutting built to allow the line access to Åndalsnes. The earthwork was transported using temporary 90and gauge railways. In 1912, tests were done in the area of the cutting to establish if it should be a cutting or a tunnel. Work with excavation started in 1915, with the cutting up to 16m deep. It was necessary to move one house to make room for the line through Åndalsnes. The station building was built in 1923 and 1924, and had an area of 316.2m2. It cost to build. Both the main station building and the auxiliary buildings were designed by Gudmund Hoel of NSB Arkitektkontor, the in-house architecture firm for the Norwegian State Railways, who were responsible for construction.