Have you ever visited an old, abandoned railroad crossing mountains? Well I didn’t before @manulele81 brought us visiting the Ex Ferrovia Spoleto - Norcia while we stayed in Norcia for the last meetup visiting the famous Fioritura di Castelluccio.
This old railway was connecting Spoleto and Norcia in the years between the first and the second world wars being in operation till the last train in the July 1968. The railway was also suspended during the second world war due to strong damages the railway was affected of, however after the war it was restored making it functional till 1968. The path was 51km long with 19 tunnels and 24 bridges to cross the mountains, the trip between Spoleto and Norcia was taking 2 hours with a line alimented by an electrical tension of 2400v.
There were several projects along the year to try to restore the railroad in some specific points, also for just touristic reasons but nowadays it is totally abandoned and all the rail trail and lines have been demounted and totally removed, sold for materials reuse and to prevent any robbery or landscape disruption.
The place has then become a natural, official trekking path to visit the beauty of the nature inside this old abandoned path. Several works have been done to make some parts of the path secure for trekking and tourist, especially after the earthquakes in the 2016.
The full path is very long, however there are several points where it is possible to take it if you would like to walk just part of it. With Emanuele as our guiding Local Guide we joined the path close to Cerreto di Spoleto, under the bridge of the current car road connecting Spoleto and Norcia. Here there is a cross among the path coming from Spoleto, and going to Norcia on the bottom or on the top of the mountain, we went in the bottom one so we could cross a couple of the old galleries.
The first gallery connecting the old station of Triponzio is long 423 meters and it is one the unique longest full walkable gallery where you need lights because you won’t see both ends when you are inside, so get equipped and make this special path in the dark of the mountain. Be aware that it is highly possible to find some bats inside here, we were lucky to find one holding on the ceiling but he flew away when we illuminated him a bit more.
After the station of Triponzio you can reach the old Balza Tagliata via the shorter tunnel with the same name, long only 109 meters. This place is the one the most scenography one I found because the railroad crosses the old car road because in this path they were travelling side by side. Amazing special due to the high vegetation grown up here the scenery is looking like a movie set! On this street it is visible another tunnel which however is blocked due to stones fallen from the top of the mountain, the access to this tunnel can be visited on the other side of it… be aware you need to come back in order to go out from it 
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The Balza Tagliata is a very old pre-roman path used to cross the mountain which is still visible underneath the big mountain in front of the path. It is very curious to see how it was small, there were some bells at both sides to alert if you were attempting to cross the path in order to avoid to find someone else, with some pack animals, coming against you. In this case most probably somebody was falling down in the most terrible result. At this same point it is also still possible to see an old hydroelectric power plan.
We walked a bit further reaching again the bridge of the new car road Spoleto - Norcia, here the old path is climbing up on the mountain and going down on the other side with a connecting path to the first initial cross we passed at the starting of our trip. Since we had two kids with us we preferred to come back via the same path we did instead of climbing the mountains.
Valnerina has many beautiful natural path and every time we go back there we discover a new amazing place. Have you even visited the Valnerina? And have you ever visited an abandoned so scenography old railroad? I think @PaulPavlinovich might specifically like this topic 
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