Ferries from Drøbak

At 06:22 on 9 April 1940, the German heavy cruiser Blücher capsized and sank in the narrows off this town. Norwegian reservists at Oscarsborg had fired Krupp guns from the 1890s and forty-year-old Whitehead torpedoes at point-blank range. The delay let King Haakon VII, the cabinet and 50 tonnes of gold get out of Oslo.

Where the boats go

• Oscarsborg, Østre Kai — about 4 minutes, 6 sailings, run by Forsvarsbygg Oscarsborgfergen.
• Oscarsborg, Vestre Kai — about 5 minutes, 5 sailings, run by Ruter.
• Filtvet — about 16 minutes, 2 sailings.
• Fagerstrand — about 14 minutes, 1 sailing.

28 active sailings across the quay.

⚠ Two operators serve the same fortress

Oscarsborg has two landings and they are worked by different organisations — the defence estates agency on one, Oslo's transport authority on the other. Tickets and timetables are not interchangeable, and the island has no other access.

Check the last return sailing on arrival. Being left on a fortified island in the Oslofjord is a memorable but expensive mistake.

Why the fortress worked

The Drøbak Sound is the narrowest point of the Oslofjord, and Oscarsborg sits in the middle of it. The guns were obsolete and the crew partly untrained reservists, but the range was so short that the shore batteries could not miss, and the torpedo battery in the tunnel on the far shore fired into the cruiser's side.

It is one of the very few occasions in the war when a fixed coastal fortress stopped a modern warship.

The town

Drøbak is a white wooden town on the eastern shore, about forty minutes south of Oslo, with a working harbour, an aquarium and a Christmas shop that operates all year. Buses run from Oslo; the boat is the better arrival.

The wreck

Blücher still lies in the sound where she sank. She is a war grave, and oil has been removed from her tanks in stages over the decades.