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.

In the footsteps of heroes

At Halden we crossed the border into Norway. The bars of reception on my phone shrank, buildings were swapped for patches of spruce and silver birch, and the ground glinted with frost. The train whooshed on, sending a raft of ducks scattering across a lake. Here the towns were built for snow, with flat roads, wide paths and unfenced homesteads that hid tractors beneath lean-tos. Then, suddenly, all that white melted away as we entered the Norwegian capital.

On Oslo’s museum-studded Bygdøy peninsula, beneath a shelter as pointed as a mountain peak, I first saw the Fram, a red-white-and-black-striped schooner that, prior to the Titanic, was the most famous ship in the world. Explorers Amundsen and Nansen had both chosen her for their Arctic expeditions between 1893 and 1912.

On her deck, stormy seas were projected onto the museum walls; below deck, it was like walking into a time capsule. Pipes lay unsmoked on a saloon table spread with games of Whist and Boston, and the dining room was set for a Christmas dinner of pork chops, marrow pudding and chocolate. I moved away from the other visitors craning their heads into the cramped cabins and slipped into the quiet bow, which was crammed with furs and pretend legs of ham. I placed a hand on her original wooden beams, studded with rivets as wide as a thumb, and her soul sparked to life. There, in the still bowels of the boat, I swear I could hear ice grinding like teeth against the wood.

Bussing back to the city centre, I joined a pair of local girls jumping into the freezing water of the wharf and then scurrying into the hot breath of a sauna. It was built across from the dramatic opera house that floats on the banks of the Bunne Fjord like a great white iceberg. As the pine-scented steam wrapped itself around our pinkening skin, my mind returned to a hazy picture mounted in the Fram Museum. On Amundsen’s expedition, a walk-in steam bath had been rigged up by the ship’s deep-voiced dog driver, Sverre Hassel, so that the crew could wash once a week. These parallels with the Fram and her crew would ghost me throughout the trip. Another example came the next day when, back on the train, I was dealing cards for a game of poker and scenes of the ship’s saloon table spread with card suits flashed before me.

A few days later, we stopped in Trondheim, a city that only knows four months of the year without snow and where you can catch 20-kilo salmon in the city centre River Nidelva. I marvelled at its long legacy of men called Olav, from the city’s founding Viking to Norway’s patron saint, whose remains still lie in a shrine in the imposing Nidaros Cathedral. The latter was once Christianity’s northernmost pilgrimage site and has a weathervane with the face of Bob Dylan carved into it thanks to a rogue sculptor.

“We’re stubborn, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously – we have an underdog spirit,” said my local guide, Siri Forsnes. It’s reflected in the old medieval alleys that contrast with ‘Bella’ and ‘Ola’, two university-designed robots who serve food to customers in the covered Olavshallen.

We knocked back drams of windpipe-warming aquavit and then boarded the century-old Nordland Line. For ten hours and 729km, Norway’s longest railway tracks in a single line along the spine of the country, crossing the Arctic Circle and finishing in the town of Bodø. The first section opened in 1882, and the line was continued by the Germans during their Second World War occupation before eventually being completed in 1962.

The best scenery starts after the town of Steinkjer. We passed villages clustered around rocky bays with frost-bitten piers and glassy water, and whizzed through pine forests that protruded from blankets of snow that were as smooth as satin. Beyond the Arctic Circle, we traversed Saltfjellet-Svartisen National Park, home to neither powerlines nor footprints – just moose, lynx, wolverine and crests of snow that arced up like great ocean waves.

At Bodø the track runs out. You can’t travel any further north by rail. This fishing community has been largely overlooked for the epically scenic Lofoten islands that sit just across the water, but that is set to change. Bodø is revving up to be a Capital of Culture in 2024 and is transforming from ragged to ritzy at a rate of knots, with an open-air festival set to take place against the backdrop of the fjord and the addition of its own champagne-breakfast café.

The lure of the Lofotens couldn’t be ignored, so we hopped on a boat chugging toward the untamed archipelago – name-dropped in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – that broods 150km north of the Arctic Circle. Its small fishing towns are framed by vast wooden racks strung with stiffening cod, their skies a whirl of seagulls and the horizon a toothsome string of serrated peaks that beckon hikers. But almost everyone comes to see the Aurora Borealis. Few other phenomena spark equal measures fear and wonder in men’s souls. The Vikings believed them to be light glancing off the armour of Valkyries, the horse-riding female cavalry who led Odin’s chosen warriors across the Bifrost Bridge to their final resting place in Valhalla. The indigenous Sami traditionally believe them to be the souls of the dead: a sight to be feared and never spoken of. For Geir Notisnes, a photographer who leads tours to see the lights, it’s a similar tale.

“When I was young, I was scared of them,” he told me. “We believed that if you looked at the lights, they would pick you up. We would run away from them!”

Nonetheless, Geir has spent two decades pursuing the aurora. “I still haven’t taken my best picture, so I keep chasing,” he sighed like a man in love.

We’d joined him for the last tour of the season, so our chances of seeing the aurora in the lighter spring skies were slim. We waited until the embering sun slowly melted below the horizon and night cast the snowy arc of the Milky Way and the slim crust of a new moon above us. Slowly, spectral wisps of cloud started to streak across the sky.

“Here they come,” whispered Geir, reverently, as if Odin’s warriors themselves were racing towards us.

“They seem pale,” I said.

“Hold your camera up to them,” instructed Geir, so I snapped at the sky. On the screen appeared a dazzling ribbon of emerald silk. “The Sami say you can hear the northern lights sing,” he added. So we stood in silence, listening.

The next day, we were picked up by Odd Helge, who offers private island tours in his state-of-the-art electric car. We cruised along ribbon-thin roads woven around mountains that knifed into the mirror-calm fjords. We passed fishing huts perched on promontories, and occasionally spied a chapel with a red turret that blinked like a siren against the whole snowy scene. Eventually, we stopped in the hamlet of Henningsvær to visit the Caviar Factory, a former processing plant for ‘black gold’ that has been turned into a trend-setting modern art gallery. Odd entered with us to have a peek around, but only afterwards, back in the car, did he say: “Sometimes tourism can really make you look at your home in a new light.”