About this journey

The journey begins at Nice-Ville station, a building opened in 1864 and completed in 1867 for the PLM railway company, designed by Louis-Jules Bouchot in the Louis XIII style with Arles stone sculptures and forged steel roofing. Nice itself passed definitively to France only in 1860 under the Treaty of Turin, and the station reflects that layered Franco-Italian heritage at the Mediterranean edge of the Alps.

The line is the Ligne de Nice à Digne, operated by the Chemins de fer de Provence — a company entirely separate from the national SNCF network. The route climbs away from the coast and into the mountains, threading through increasingly remote terrain before reaching the Upper Verdon valley. Near Thorame-Haute the line passes through the longest tunnel on its entire length, the passage that links the Verdon and Vaïre valleys through the mountain barrier.

Thorame-Haute station is the sole railway station in the Upper Verdon valley, set approximately 7 km downstream from the village itself. The surrounding landscape sits at roughly 1,150 metres altitude, with peaks rising to 2,693 m. The drapery factories that once gave the valley an economic identity had all closed before the First World War, and the railway has remained the valley's most tangible connection to the wider world — the contrast with busy, sun-lit Nice-Ville could hardly be more complete.