Is this the best steam train in the world?

Beautiful scenery, pristine stations, perfectly polished engines, and some Cold War intrigue – the Harz Railway is an aficionado’s dream, says Michael Williams

Imagine you could create your ultimate fantasy train set. For me (and I suspect possibly you) it would be a network of quaint branch lines passing through some remote, timeless and beautiful landscape. The little wayside stations would be immaculate and the regular train service would run on time every day. The engines would be steam-powered and polished to a tee – just like the carriages.

The stationmasters and porters are in smart uniforms, greeting passengers with a cheery wave, and the ticket offices are always open. Most important, the line would serve real people going about their daily business, not serve as a museum piece for trainspotters. Could such an idyllic railway exist in 2016?

Well, I think I’ve come close to finding it this fine morning as I catch a whiff of that tantalising cocktail of coal, warm oil and sulphur wafting along the street in the German town of Werningerode, that signifies only one thing – that there is a steam train waiting to depart.

“Whatever you do, don’t call this a ‘Toy Train’, just because we’re narrow gauge,” says Heidi, who hands me my ticket at this, the main terminus of the Harzer Schmalspur Bahnen, otherwise known as the Harz Railway. “You just wait till you’ve travelled on it.”

And I soon find out what she means. Although it has a gauge of just a metre this is a grown-up railway of superlatives. With three interconnecting lines extending just over 140 kilometres and serving 48 stations it is Europe’s longest railway network with daily steam operation, and has the largest fleet of passenger steam locomotives, with 25 engines. “We’ve got 10 running this morning alone,” Heidi tells me. “And this is a quiet time of the year.” Nowhere else in the world can anything like this still be experienced.

Crucially, unlike almost all the hundreds of “heritage” railways around the world masquerading as the real thing, the Harz runs a proper timetabled service throughout the year, attracting 1.1 million passengers – a mix of hikers, tourists, shoppers, schoolchildren, commuters, country folk off to market – and folk who come here simply to marvel.

Today I am one of them, clutching my ticket for a journey, which, unlike almost any train ride in the world, is simultaneously lodged in the past and East German border guards on patrol in 1978, above; St Servatius church in Quedlinburg, right the present. The Harz mountain region of the former East Germany, through which the three branches of the HSB pass, is the land of ancient fairy tales – dark forests, rushing streams and snow-capped mountains.

Here are unspoilt medieval towns, such as Quedlinburg and Goslar, with steep-roofed houses and narrow cobblestone streets that have slumbered unchanged for centuries. Yet the trains that serve them, despite their antediluvian motive power, run as efficiently as any modern railway.

That’s not all. My 09.47 train this morning will take me along the Brockenbahn section of the line to the snowy peak of Brocken mountain – at 1,142 metres the highest in northern Germany. If the legends are to be believed, this will be one of the most thrilling steam rides on the planet.

And there, in the adjacent locomotive depot – so tidy that it looks like an illustration from a Thomas the Tank Engine book – is the 2-10-2 tank engine that will pull our train. The driver is polishing its paint to a blackberry shine, while the fireman fusses around with the oilcan. Even the smart red paint on the wheels is being enthusiastically burnished so that no spot of grime remains.

The Harz’s extraordinary survival is partly thanks to being caught up in a time warp as part of communist East Germany, which never had the money and incentive to modernise. Why bother when there was plenty of coal for the engines and lots of cheap labour for undertaking the dirty work of firing and maintaining machines?

Founded between 1886 and 1897, the Harzquerbahn, the Selketalbahn and the Brockenbahn, the three lines that form today’s network, thrived in a region prosperous with mining, agriculture and tourism until dramatic change came with the division of Germany after the Second World War. Suddenly this branch line backwater assumed a crucial role in the security of the entire Soviet bloc, transporting troops and supplies to the top of Brocken mountain, home to one of the main Russian listening posts for obtaining information on western Europe. (The Stasi security men, depicted in the hit Channel 4 series Deutschland 83, would probably have received some of their sinister intelligence through here.)

When the border fence came down in 1989, here was an unreconstructed slice of Soviet-era transportation preserved in aspic. And for today’s traveller with an eye for period pieces of the Fifties and Sixties there is nostalgia and ostalgie galore (the nickname for the craze for all things East German).

While our train’s locomotive, No99 7237-3, has an immaculate Soviet Bloc pedigree – having been built in 1954 at Lokomotivbau Karl Marx at Potsdam Babelsberg – it is curiously reminiscent of the British Railways “Standard” tank engines that used to ply commuter trains out of Britain’s big stations. Even the livery of carriages uncannily resembles that of the old BR “plum and spilt milk” colours of the period.

“You’re going to be lucky with the weather this morning,” the guard tells me as he gets ready for the “off”. For 300 days of the year, the top of the mountain is shrouded in mist, but this morning there’s apparently bright sunshine. “But the snow is really deep