Friday November 27th 2009, over 1,2 million Norwegians watched parts of “Bergensbanen” on NRK2. The longest documentary ever? At least the longest we have made, almost 7 1/2 hours, showing every minute of the scenic train ride between Bergen on the Norwegian west coast, crossing the mountains to the capital of Oslo.

Bergensbanen is 100 years in 2009, and the documentary was a wild idea from NRK staff that came through, and was, surprisingly, a big success.

On Twitter, this became the thing to talk about in Norway. Over 1 000 tweets with #bergensbanen were posted, and even more when we ran the program again two days later.

Now we want to give the material to our viewers, the whole thing, for download.

The documentary had picture-in-picture clips with videos about Bergensbanen, a reporter interviewing people on the train, music and two cameras pointing to the sides of the train. Because of rights, we had to remove the music and many videoclips, so we decided to make a clean front camera version for this download. It’s recorded on a Sony 700 camera in XDCAM HD 1080 50i. The camera has a 30 seconds buffer, making it possible to switch disks when needed. So we have a continuous recording of 7 hours.

Full history here.

The documentary can be downloadad using this torrent file [22GB]. A reduced version of the documentary is available on YouTube.