About this journey

Annot station sits at 680 metres in a landscape of sandstone rising through limestone mountains, the starting point of a summer steam working on the Ligne de Nice à Digne — the metre-gauge railway known locally as the Train des Pignes. Construction of the 1,000 mm gauge line began in 1890, with a partial opening in 1892; the railway reached Annot itself in 1908, and the full line between Nice and Digne-les-Bains was inaugurated from 5 to 7 August 1911. The line is not part of SNCF: since 1972 it has operated under a 99-year concession held by the Syndicat Mixte Méditerranée Alpes (SYMA).

The 151-kilometre line passes through 27 tunnels along its length, among them the 3,457-metre Tunnel de la Colle Saint-Michel, completed in 1903 and exiting on the Digne side at 1,023 metres altitude. The locomotive making this run, CP E211 — a Henschell-built Mallet 2-4-6-0T — hauls the train over the roughly 38 kilometres to Puget-Théniers on a route that threads the valley of the Var through rock and gorge. The steam service on this stretch recorded patronage increases of 50 to 60 percent in 2006–2007, a measure of what a working mountain railway, built across two decades and kept alive through floods and closures, continues to draw to this corner of the southern Alps.