The Blue Train, the Train des Pignes and the Tende line: the Riviera by rail, the back story

About The Blue Train, the Train des Pignes and the Tende line: the Riviera by rail, the back story

By the ULTIMATE French Riviera Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

The railway made the Riviera. The night express from Calais and Paris, famous as the Blue Train, brought princes, painters and novelists to the coast; the little Train des Pignes still runs from Nice into the mountains of Haute-Provence; and the line up the wild Roya valley to Tende is running again.

The Blue Train

From 1886 a luxury night express, the Calais-Méditerranée Express, ran from Calais through Paris and Lyon to the Riviera, as far as Menton. In the 1920s its dark-blue sleeping cars, trimmed in gold, earned it the name the world remembers: the Blue Train. The Prince of Wales, Charlie Chaplin, Coco Chanel, Winston Churchill, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Somerset Maugham all travelled on it.

It inspired Agatha Christie’s The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928), with Hercule Poirot on board, and in 1924 a ballet, Le Train Bleu, for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with music by Darius Milhaud, a story by Jean Cocteau, costumes by Chanel and a curtain after Picasso. The TGV ended the age of the luxury night trains, and the name itself disappeared in 2003.

On the Blue Train, the night began in the grey of Calais and ended with the morning sun on the Mediterranean.

The Train des Pignes

Behind Nice, a metre-gauge railway climbs 151 kilometres into the mountains to Digne-les-Bains: the line of the Chemins de fer de Provence, known to everyone as the Train des Pignes. Its first sections opened in 1891 and 1892, and it was completed in 1911. It runs through 25 tunnels and over 16 bridges and viaducts, and reaches its highest point, 1,023 metres, just beyond the tunnel under the Colle-Saint-Michel, more than three kilometres long.

The journey from Nice to Digne takes about three hours and twenty minutes, with four return trips a day, up the valley of the Var, past perched villages and the walled town of Entrevaux. On certain weekends from May to October, a heritage steam train runs between Puget-Théniers and Annot.

The Tende line

The railway from Nice up the Roya valley to Breil-sur-Roya and Tende, threaded through tunnels and over viaducts beneath perched villages, is one of the most spectacular in France. In October 2020 Storm Alex tore through the valley and badly damaged the line. After fifteen months of works, costing some €74 million, the Nice–Breil–Tende line reopened on 15 December 2025, with more trains to follow through 2026. The line on to Cuneo in Italy has a far thinner service; in summer 2026 a heritage tourist train ran on Sundays between Cuneo, Tende and Ventimiglia.

Our advice: take the Train des Pignes from its own station in Nice, the Gare des Chemins de fer de Provence, and break the journey at Entrevaux or Annot; for the steam train, check the season’s dates before you plan. For the Roya valley, check the latest timetable on the regional Zou! site before you set out.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with The Blue Train, the Train des Pignes and the Tende line: the Riviera by rail, the back story before you go.