This week’s dream: A train through old Germany

“Steam locomotives are impossibly romantic”—perhaps none more so than those that run on the Fichtelbergbahn, said T.R. Goldman in The Washington Post. The small German railroad began operating in 1897, transporting people and freight 11 miles through the scenic Ore Mountains along what’s now Germany’s border with the Czech Republic. Today, the Fichtelbergbahn carries 200,000 sightseeing passengers each year, from Cranzahl to the low-key ski village of Oberwiesenthal, a former silver-mining town and the highest settlement in the nation. Many of these visitors are train aficionados who, like me, are drawn to the region by the ride itself.

Oberwiesenthal is one of Germany’s best-value ski resorts, favored by families who pack the little inns above the train station and wander into the main square when they’re not on the slopes. Picturesque lodgings like the Hotel-Gasthof Rotgiesserhaus sit near “very GDR” restaurants like the main square’s Café Central, a place where the bad lighting, cheap beer, and taxidermied animals offer their own retrograde Soviet-era charm. We train buffs spent many hours just milling about the village’s railyard, “photographing the engines as if they were exotic zoo animals.” Because they run on narrow-gauge tracks, the locomotives are about half normal size, and though plenty powerful, they’re also “impossibly cute.”

The engineer and the fireman agree to let me ride in their cab as my train embarks for Cranzahl. A high-pitched, breathy whistle sounds, and then the chug-chug-chug starts, “first slowly and methodically, then rapidly crescendoing in speed.” The engine shoots thick bursts of white steam into the air as we weave through the mountains, and I admire the orange-roofed villages in the valley below. Later, I discover that both tourists and locals often pull their cars over to watch the train pass overhead on a 75-foot-tall viaduct about half a mile outside Oberwiesenthal. One Bavarian visitor struggles to answer when I ask him to explain the attraction. “It’s black, it’s beautiful,” he says. “It’s life inside.”

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At Hotel-Gasthof Rotgiesserhaus (rotgiesserhaus.de), doubles start at $110.