An Arctic rail SAGA

Take a ride on the real Polar Express with a new tour that uses the Nordic rail network to cross the Arctic Circle and enter a frozen world of huskies, ice hotels and dazzling night skies

- Emma Thomson

All around me the snow lay smooth as Christmas cake icing. The surface was cracked only by the metallic shimmer of a frigid river. I stared at my phone, transfixed, as a blinking circle traversed the dotted line stitched across the map. I had crossed the Arctic Circle - the invisible halo of latitude that crowns the northern fringes of Russia, Canada, USA, Greenland, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden, as if a school compass had been swizzled around the top of the Earth.

I looked around me, waiting for the fanfare. The spotless carriage of the Nordland train, bound for Bodø, was empty save for a lone man whose head was burrowed inside a book. The words, We are soon crossing the Arctic Circle,' still blinked silently across the train's digital message board.

The soothing warmth of the carriage cocooned us as the monochrome scenery spooled past the window like an old film, but part of me itched for the occasion to be marked by the breathless, frostbitten striving of the Arctic expeditions of old. The siren song of the North is strong. It whispers in your ear with an icy breath that sets the spine a-tingle with the promise of adventure and a clawed handshake with Nature. Polar explorer Roald Amundsen heard it; so too did Fridtjof Nansen, who made the first crossing of Greenland's interior. I'd heeded the call and joined Discover the World's new '21-night Arctic Rail Odyssey' tour that departs from London St Pancras and snakes ever northward through Germany, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

So far, we had clacked through the farms, fields and gunmetal-grey skies of Belgium towards the church spires of Cologne in Germany, where we'd knocked back Kolsh beers and bratwurst, then pushed on to Copenhagen, where the blossoms of magnolia and cherry trees had shrunk back to bare branches, as if the seasons were rewinding.