The Bānītis — Gulbene to Alūksne

Latvia once had a great deal of narrow gauge — some 432 kilometres at 750 mm in the mid-1930s, and more than 500 km at 600 mm — and almost all of it went. What survives is 33 kilometres between Gulbene and Alūksne, the tail of a 210-kilometre line from Pļaviņas to Valka that opened on 15 August 1903 and was cut back piece by piece until only this stub was left. It is the only narrow-gauge railway in the Baltic states still running a scheduled passenger service. Latvians call the train the bānītis, and it has been worked since January 2002 by a company owned in Gulbene rather than by the state.

There are two return trips a day, every day of the year, usually a Soviet-built TU7A diesel and a single carriage. On Saturdays, on dates the operator publishes a season ahead, the early-afternoon working is taken instead by Gr-319 — a wood-burning 0-8-0 called Ferdinands, which stops at Paparde to fill its tank from a timber water tower. The line crosses the lake country of eastern Vidzeme at a walking pace, calling at nine places of which five are request stops: you signal from the trackside, or tell the guard before you board. The diesel covers the 33 kilometres in eighty-five minutes. The steam engine takes a hundred and ten.

The bānītis starts from a corner of Gulbene station, where two gauges still share a yard. The main building serves the broad-gauge line from Riga; behind it, on 750 mm track, stand the narrow-gauge depot, its workshops and a fan-shaped engine shed built in the first half of the twentieth century. Beside the shed is a turntable laid with rails of both widths at once — the only dual-gauge turntable in Latvia, used both to place engines in the shed and to turn them to run the other way around. Tickets are sold at the depot before departure, by card or in cash, and there is a free exhibition about the line in the ground-floor corridor of the administration building.

Ordinary trains are a TU7A diesel built in the 1980s and one carriage. The operator keeps two patterns, a 24-seat vehicle it calls the soft carriage and a 40-seat Polish-built one whose interior has been put back to varnished wooden benches; a second carriage is added when the loadings need it, and a van when a party of cyclists has booked. All the carriages have a lavatory and all of them are heated through the winter. Bicycles travel on a luggage ticket, and groups of more than five are asked to say so in advance.

The engine they call Ferdinands

The steam locomotive is Gr-319, an 0-8-0 of a class whose Cyrillic initials, Гр, stand for German reparations. After 1945 the Soviet Union's narrow-gauge lines were desperately short of motive power, and the defeated side was ordered to build 400 of these engines as part of the settlement. They were made at the Orenstein & Koppel works in Babelsberg, renamed the Karl Marx locomotive works in July 1948; 349 were delivered between 1947 and 1956. The design was drawn in a hurry, on the wreckage of the old drawings, and it shows — above about 35 km/h the engine rolls badly, which on this line does not matter at all. It weighs 25.6 tonnes, runs on 800 mm wheels, takes curves of 40 metres, and its grate was built for burning wood, so the tender is stacked with split logs above the height of the bunker. Halfway to Alūksne it stops at Paparde to take water from an octagonal timber tower standing on a stone base, and the stop is printed in the timetable.

Nine stops, five of them by request

Gulbene is the only place on the line the operator still calls a station. Everything else is a stopping point, and at Birze, Pūriņi, Dunduri, Paparde and Vējiņi the train halts only if it is asked to — passengers waiting on the platform are enough, or a word to the guard when you get on. Five of the stops keep their original buildings: Kalniena, Stāmeriene, Paparde, Umernieki and Alūksne all had station status once, and their timber and brick station houses are still standing beside the track, several of them restored.

Through Bānīša Land

Between the stops the line runs through farmland, birch and pine, and the lakes of eastern Vidzeme, crossing the Umāra on a small girder bridge just short of Paparde. Since 2019 the country either side of it has been marketed as Bānīša Land, with six waymarked cycling routes that each begin or end at one of the stations, so that a ride out and a ride back can be made on different wheels. Two purpose-built points have been laid out for watching the train — one at Stāmeriene, one on Pullāna Hill outside Alūksne.

Alūksne

The train ends in the highest town in Latvia, 217 metres up on the East Vidzeme Upland and set on the shore of Lake Alūksne. Its station and the historic goods shed beside it have been restored, and the buildings now hold a multimedia exhibition on what the railway meant to the people who lived along it. Trains have been terminating here since 1973, when the section on to Ape closed; until 1970 they had run further still, to Valga on the Estonian border.

Two return trips run every day of the year. All the times below are the departure times printed in the operator's own kustības saraksts, read on banitis.lv in August 2026, and the fare table further down comes from the same sheet. A trailing * marks a request stop, where the train halts only if passengers are waiting or someone on board has asked the guard.

Gulbene to Alūksne

Alūksne to Gulbene

The steam column is the Saturday afternoon working on the published dates only; on those days Gr-319 leaves Gulbene at the usual 13:00 but starts back from Alūksne at 16:00 rather than 16:30, because it needs the water stop at Paparde in each direction.

The 2026 steam dates

Gr-319 Ferdinands works on these Saturdays: 4 and 18 April; 2, 16 and 30 May; 13 and 27 June; 11 and 25 July; 8 and 22 August; 5 and 19 September; 3, 17 and 31 October; and 19 December. The Bānīša svētki, the line's own festival, falls on 5 September 2026 and marks its 123rd year; there are also Easter and Christmas trains, and tasting trips through the summer.

Getting to Gulbene

Gulbene is 180 kilometres from Riga and the train from the capital runs at weekends only — a search of the operator's planner for any Wednesday returns nothing at all. Vivi works one service each way, and its Saturday and Sunday timetables have been aligned with the bānītis since 26 October 2025.

That makes a day return from Riga work in both directions. On a Saturday: in at 11:42, out on the 13:00, back from Alūksne at 16:30 — or 16:00 behind the steam engine — into Gulbene at 17:55, and home on the 18:47. On a Sunday: the 13:00 out, the 15:25 back, and the 17:17 to Riga. Fares checked on vivi.lv in August 2026; the Riga–Gulbene ticket is €8.70.

Times and dates are published by the operator: Gulbenes – Alūksnes bānītis · kustības saraksts (opens in a new tab).

Fares are charged by distance and they are small: the end-to-end single from Gulbene to Alūksne is €5.00, the shortest hop is €1.00, and five trips over the full line cost €9.00. There is no premium for the steam train — on its published Saturdays the Gr-319 works the ordinary service at the ordinary fare. Tickets are sold at Gulbene depot before departure, by card or cash, and on board from the guard, who takes cash only. Nothing is sold online and no seat needs booking.

A bicycle is charged separately, from €0.60 for one stop up to €3.00 for the full 33 kilometres — worth knowing, because it is the combination the line is built around: out by train, back along one of the six waymarked cycling routes. Groups of more than five cyclists are asked to book, so the goods van can be coupled on.

No rail pass covers the bānītis, and it barely matters: the whole line costs €5.00.

Interrail's list of the companies a pass is valid with in Latvia — checked in August 2026, when the page carried a last updated 28 August 2026 stamp — names three: Vivi, which runs the national network including the weekend train from Riga to Gulbene; LTG Link, for the Vilnius service; and Elron, for the Estonian expresses. The excluded column is empty. SIA Gulbenes – Alūksnes bānītis, which has operated the narrow gauge since 2002, is not on the list, so a pass buys nothing on the 750 mm section.

What a pass does cover is the way in. A Latvia One Country Pass, or any global pass on a Baltic trip, is valid on the 08:31 from Riga and on the evening train back, which is the only public transport that reaches Gulbene by rail. Whether it is worth buying is a separate question: the Riga–Gulbene fare is €8.70 each way, so a day return costs €17.40 in ordinary tickets, and a pass has to be doing more work than this one journey to pay for itself. On a trip that is only Latvia, ordinary tickets are usually cheaper. On a Tallinn–Riga–Vilnius run they are not.

Checked against the operators' published conditions in August 2026.

Thirty-three kilometres is short enough that the stops are the journey. Gulbene has the working half — the depot, the workshops and the turntable — while the middle of the line reaches a manor house with an Italian novelist in its history and a water tower that a steam engine still uses. At the far end is the highest town in Latvia, on a lake with a ruined Teutonic castle on an island in it.

Both ends of the line have somewhere to stay, and one of them belongs to the railway. Prices and grades are not listed here because none have been verified; what follows is what each house says about itself on its own website, read in August 2026.