Gemuser
Service Attendant
What follows is culled from my Facebook posts for family & friends so its more a my Swiss adventure than a normal travelogue. It has some rather obvious explanations & some really local Sydney & family references. Hope you enjoy it!
A Month on the World Biggest Electric Train Set
25 Dec 2016
I am sitting in a coffee shop at Abu Dhabi while connecting from my 14 hour flight from Sydney to my 7.5 flight to Geneva. We arrived 30 min early which means I have a 4:15 connection instead of a 3:45 one! By the time I reach Geneva I'll have been awake for almost 40 hours!!! Don't expect much in the way of posts until next week. In the meantime have a Merry Christmas (what you have left of it! It's 6:30 am Christmas morning here) & a Happy New Year.
I’m here! Arrived this afternoon after a flight on my all-time favourite big jet, a 2/3 empty one! Plus it was an A330 which is also a favourite as it has 2-4-2 seating. Because of the political situation when we reached the head of the Gulf we turned north east and into Turkey basically along the Iranian border to the Black Sea, then west over Bulgaria, Serbia and across to the Croatian Adriatic coast, then across the Venice lagoon and were still at 40,000 feet [more than 12,000 meters] as we passed between Milan & Como. He did what I've heard called a "bomb & weave" approach. He stayed high, then dropped like bomb, to a point, and wove through the "rocks" ie the Alps, I think we were higher than the Matterhorn, but I wouldn't swear to it, then down to Lake Geneva, still way too high so we had a very nice tour of the southern end of the lake before he was low enough to do the approach. Very good flying, you don't often get steep turns in a large passenger jet like that!
The Swiss were their usual efficient self, we landed at 1:20 [25 min early] by 1:55 I was on the airport station waiting for a train, as its a public holiday they only come every 20 minutes & I had just missed one]! By 2:40 pm I was checked into the hotel and sorting out my luggage.
Now having written this I'm going looking for dinner in an hour or so and then to bed.
26 Dec 2015
First full day in Geneva [or Geneve, in French]. Walked down to the lake and around the harbour which is where the lake empties into the Rhone River. Walked along the river for awhile hen caught a tram out to the north west suburbs then back thru the city to the UN area in the north east suburbs then back to the hotel for rest. Tomorrow is my first real train trip to Nyon & La Cure in the Jurra mountains, then Monday I move on to Montreux.
27 Dec 2015
Today it was time for the first of the train rides that are the real reason for this holiday! I took the 9:49 Regional Express [RE] two stations up the lake about 30 km, to Nyon from where I took the NStCM narrow gauge train up into the Jura Mountains to La Cure. Just to prove that the Swiss are not invincible in their railway timetabling this train connected to a "short working" that only went to St Cergue. So rather than spending 30 min waiting in a rather cold & draughty Nyon station I caught the St Cergue train and spent the 30 min waiting in a rather nice coffee shop 50 m from the station, then caught the next train to the end of the line and horror of horrors it was running 6 min late. When we arrived I tried to ask the drive how long we were stopping, but he would not hold still long enough to get two words in, he was really stressed and kept going to the other end of the train and climbed into the cab. I figured if he was that stressed I'd better get on immediately. Good thing too as he powered up and we were out of there!
It's an interesting line. Narrow gauge, 1 meter, electrified and climbs 1000 meters in about 30 km, that's steep for a train.
We got back to Nyon and I connected to a nonstop Interregional Express [iR] back to Geneva. I am going to spend the rest of today resting for my big day tomorrow travelling to Montreux and my second mountain railway.
28 Dec 2015
I left out of Geneva on the 9:30 IR to Montreux. Solid fog ALL the way! Lifted a little after we passed Lausanne, but not much. Found the hotel after a little searching, turned right instead of left and the Swiss are not any better at putting street numbers on their buildings than we are! Was allowed to dump my bags in the room before it was ready, which was good. Went back to the Gare and got the 12:23 IR 35 minutes back towards Geneva to Morges were I join the MBC train to Apples & Biere. I didn't do the branch to L'isle due to time constraints. The MBC is another local railway line in the Jura Mountains like the NStG&M in yesterday’s post. Not as scenic or as steep but still very worthwhile but it didn't get above the fog until almost the end of the line. I arrived back at Montreux about 4:00 pm. The MBC used to the BAM, I'm glad its not anymore because to me the BAM is the Baikal-Amour Railway which is an over 3,000 km long railway in Russia connecting Siberia to the Russian Far East [RFE] 1,000 km north of the Chinese boarder.
29 Dec 2015
Had a very important phone call this morning. As a result I was somewhat late getting started this morning so I went and talked to the nice ladies at the Golden Pass Centre which is the headquarters for the MOB railway which runs most of the mountain lines around this end of the lake. As a result I have a reservation for the front seat in the observation car on Thursdays Golden Pass Panorama Train up into the Alps to Zweisimmen. The thing about this seat is that it sits BELOW the driver! An uninterrupted view ahead!!! I’m looking forward to that.
So as not to waste a day on my Swiss Travel Pass I used the half fare card that comes with the pass to take the rack railway from Montreux to Rochers-de-Naye which is a ski resort high, high above Montreux. This line is not covered by the Pass. This is a classic Swiss mountain rack railway, very, very interesting. I have just returned from this trip, 90 minutes each way and an hour between trains.
More local trains from Montreux & Vevey tomorrow.
30 Dec 2015
Second day of local & narrow gauge rains out of Montreux. Took the 9:44 Golden Pass train weaving its way up the side of the mountain Montreux sits at the bottom of. This is actually the train I mentioned yesterday that I am taking tomorrow, but only for 45 minutes, the full trip which I do tomorrow is 3:00 hours. At Montbovon I changed to small local train of TPF. This looked just like the original trams for Sydney's Light Rail! [Checking the builder’s plate, they are off the same production line!] Somewhat better fitted out than Sydney's including more & better seats and a wheel chair accessible loo!
When we arrived it was sitting on the loop track waiting for us. Looking around it seemed it would follow the train from Montreux as we hadn't pass a junction on our way into town, but he tricked everyone, he headed back the way we came and then turned on the villages main street and proceeded about 1.5 km down streets and left town on the side of the road and stayed there for most of the trip to Bulle. Here he reversed in the station and proceeded to Broc end of the line. From here we went back to Bulle where I changed trains to a SBB [swiss Federal Railways, in German] for the run down to Romont on the Geneva - Bern mainline. While waiting to change trains I had lunch at the station bistro, the food was the same as Bows in the 1960/70!!! [For the confused, a local Chinese restaurant in Blacktown, at the time]. I then travelled down the mainline to Lausanne and changed for Vevey where I changed to the Blonay line. This is another narrow gauge mountain line that climbed up the mountain behind Vevey. At Blonay we changed to an even narrower gauge line to Les Pleiades a ski resort [currently minus snow] on top of a local mountain. From here it was back to Blonay change and back to Vevey then change for Montreux about 5:00 pm, the longest day train riding so far!
More tomorrow after my full ride on the Golden Pass.
31 Dec 2015
Today I took the "Golden Pass Express - Panoramic" from Montreux to Zweisimmen, the whole line this time not just the first 45 minutes of yesterday. It's a narrow gauge [1 meter, about 3'3" in old money], not rack but steep. It was a funny looking train. The thumping great [for 1m gauge] electric loco sat in the middle of the train, on either side of it were two 2 nd class panoramic cars with a 1 st class panoramic cars on each outer end. The outer two cars each had a driving cab above the front seats [not below as some documents said]. The front eight were extra fare reserved seats which I had reserved on Tuesday. Fabulous view out the front as one would expect, I have about 90 minutes of video.
As per yesterday the train wove its way up the mountain to Montbovon. This turned out to be a summit and from here the train wound its way along a river valley for about 30 km. There was some snow on the ground but it was very patchy, certainly none of the ski resorts had runs open yet. We continued along river valleys and over a couple more summits sometimes low down near the river, other times high up the valley sides on a rock shelf. Eventually we came down the side of one valley and could see Zweisimmen below us; the train then went into a horse shoe shaped tunnel on a steep down slope to emerge just outside town and so into the station.
At Zweisimmen I changed trains to a standard gauge train of the BLS railway which followed the river down to the town of Spiez on the Bern - Milan main line. This is known as the Lotschberg line as it uses the Lotschberg Pass over the Alps.
South of Spiez the line splits in two, the old line climbing high into the Alps to reach the original Lotschberg Tunnel and then plunging down into the Rhone valley to reach Brig. This is the route I took today. The new line stays MUCH lower and uses the new Lotschberg Base Tunnel, much faster but much more boring. From Brig it was a quick 90 minute run down the Rhone river valley to Lake Geneva and Montreux.
1 Jan 2016
A pretty easy day today. Just moved from Montreux to Brig an hour & half up the Rhone valley, very flat but surrounded by some v-e-r-y tall mountains. After checking in I went up to Kandersteg at the top of the Lotschberg Pass as I wanted to ride UP the south ramp of the Lotschberg (yesterday I rode down it) as it is a spectacular climb out of the Rhone valley at Brig, literally on a shelf cut into a sheer rock face. Turned around at Kandersteg, photograph some car carrying trains and returned to Brig. The Swiss do not like cars in long tunnels and have a policy of no more long car tunnels, all the newer tunnels are all train tunnels that also carry cars.
Tomorrow is a fairly big day, off to Domodossola in Italy where I catch the Centrovallie railway, another steep mountain railway back into Switzerland to the town of Locarno where I spend the night.
2 Jan 2016
Left Brig on a BLS local train to Domodolossa the first significant town in Italy on this train line. The hotel was close to the station so I got there a bit early and as the train started there it was in the platform a good 20 minutes before departure. So I got my bags and self on board and got a window seat facing forward and was still able to keep an eye on my bags. Then at about 5 minutes before departure FIVE young families descended on the carriage. That's 9 adults and seven children, four of whom were in strollers, but not what we call strollers these were serious cold weather, gear carrying, mountain climbing strollers! The 4 of them took up most of the luggage space in that carriage and threatened to drop my suit case into the door well! After a little bit of juggling around we got everybody accommodated and the luggage and bike space totally full!
This trip was over the Simplon Pass using the Simplon Tunnel finished in 1905. The tunnel is 20 km long and starts in Brig yard and takes about 20 minutes to cover. A lot of the run down the south side is in various shorter tunnels and snow/avalanche shelters, so not much to see.
We arrived in Domodolossa on time, half an hour after we left Brig, and got everything out of the luggage area. I expected to see a sign to the Centrovalle Railway but there was nothing so I headed for the exit and down in the subway I found an FS assistant who told me the way, back up on to the platform next to the one I had just come off, go along towards the end then down another set of stairs and turn left. So off I went, fortunately there was a lift down to the Centrovallie concourse and I made the connection with a small amount of time to spare.
The Centrovallie is another mountain railway, this one more twisty and convoluted than steep. The train itself is also unusual in that each carriage only has wheels on one end, the other end rests on the wheels of the next carriage [except the two end carriages, they have wheels on each end]. As a result of this it can go around curves much tighter than a normal train. I saw signs saying that curves were 64 meters, that's about 4 times smaller than was ever used on NSW railways. The carriages themselves were also unusual in that had enormous windows that made up most of the sides and they were slanted quite sharply so making the roof quite small. This made for fabulous views.
The trip was fairly spectacular; leaving Domodolossa we crossed open river flat fields until we came to the start of the hills when using those very tight curves it wound its way back and forth as it climbed up into the mountains. The name "Centrovalle means "a hundred valleys" in Italian and we certainly did cross at least 100 valleys, sometime on quite major bridges sometime small, many tunnels and along shelves cut from the rock. After about 2 hours of this we descended into one final valley into Locarno.
Locarno is a nice looking town, quite lush looking for this time of year, it's in Switzerland's "tropics" and on steep hill sides running up from the lake, unfortunately it started raining shortly after we crossed into Switzerland and hasn't stopped, not heavy just drizzly. I'm only here one night but I will put Locarno on my must come back to list.
Tomorrow I get the "William Tell Express" to Luzern, where I am for 5 days, so more tomorrow.
3 Jan 2016
Well today was an interesting day. Left Locarno at 10:47 for Luzern on the William Tell Express. The interesting thing is that the WTE is not an actual train, it is a through ticket on various services, you’ll see as today progresses. So I left Locarno in first class seat 64, car 2 on the IR 2422 to Zurich. Car 2 was a Panoramic car which had very big windows. So we headed down the branch and joined the main line at Bellinzona. From here we were on the Gotthard Pass line which runs from Zurich to Milan. This is a spectacular line with many high bridges, long tunnels including 4 spiral tunnels all with a backdrop of some very high mountains.
About 12:45 we arrived at Fluelen where I left the train and walked down to the wharf on Lake Luzern and boarded the good ship Europa. The Purser spent some time looking through my tickets then asked "Didn't you get the vouchers and info pack in Locarno?" Turns out I was supposed to be met at Locarno by a hostess, escorted to my seat and given a souvenir pack which contained the vouchers the purser was looking for! She dug around in her little office and produced one!
I was sent immediately to the 1 st class restaurant for lunch, which was a 3 course soup, main, desert fixed price meal, and the voucher covered about 60% of the cost. A very, very pleasant 2:45 was spent cruising down Lake Luzern while eating a top class meal, which started with the BEST pumpkin soup I have ever tasted. Meanwhile some of the best mountain/lake scenery in the world was passing by the window, including the Rutil Meadow where the original Swiss confederation was formed in 1291. About 3:45 we arrived in Luzern and my hotel was only 100 meters from the landing stage.
4 Jan 2016
Not much to report today mostly just rested & walked a bit in the area around the hotel. I did do one train trip, a two hour return trip to Engelberg up in the mountains south west of Luzern, on the narrow gauge Die Zentralbhan railway. Nice ride along the shore of Lake Luzern, then up a gently rising valley to its end, then the sneaky Swiss railway plan comes into play. At the head of the valley the train plunges into a tunnel, and you can hear it engage the rack. For those a little vague about it, the rack is a toothed rail laid between the rails and is engage by a cog wheel on the loco, this enables the train to go up & down much steeper track then otherwise. When we finally exit tunnel after 7-8 minutes you can hear the rack disengage, from there it was a couple of km to the end of the line.
Engelberg actually had snow on the ground, the first I had seen, up close. Snow was still fairly light and there did not appear to be much ski resort type action happening. Returned to Luzern, and had a nap!
5 Jan 2016
Spent yesterday climbing to the top of Mount Rigi [around 3000 meters], by train of course! Left Luzern by train to Arth Goldau, about 30 minutes, then waited 50 minutes for the Arth Rigi train. Another fabulous, steep, rack railway. For the first twenty minutes or so we wound up the hill side through typical farming country until we hit the snow line. From here to the summit it was through a frozen winter wonderland, the first real snow I had seen up close. Got some amazing picture [iF they came out] will try and post some tonight. When we got to the summit there was real snow about although only one ski run, out of about 30 was actually open.
From the summit I took the Vitznau Rigi railway down to Vitznau on Lake Luzern. From here I got a boat back towards Luzern but got off at Verkehrshaus, the stop for the Swiss Transport Museum. Well the railway exhibits were stunning but stealing the show was an actual Swissair Convair CV-990 jet airliner. A contemporary of the Boeing 707 & Douglas DC-8 it was and I think still is the fast sub-sonic jet airliner. It was a commercial failure and very few were made which means its very very rare. It’s certainly the only one I've seen! Along with the CV-880 I saw at Graceland in 2012 that completes my collection of early jet airliners!!!
After all that excitement a suburban train back to Luzern Bahnhoff [main station] was actually welcome.
7 Jan 2016
Well today was a bit of a mess. The plan was to leave Luzern on the 10:30 boat to Weggis, catch the KRA [no I don't know what it stands for] up to Rigi Kadstat, catch the Vitznau Rigi railway to the summit then the Rigi Goldau down to Arth-Goldau then a mainline SBB train to Goschenen then ride the MGB's narrow gauge rack railway through the Goschenen Gorge to Andermatt & then head back to Luzern. That WAS the plan! It didn't work out that way.
First off the 10:30 boat from Luzern was cancelled, so I had to take the 12:00 one. A careful reading of the timetable suggested it was still possible, so I gave it a go. Got to Weggis OK but nobody or book mentioned it was a 750 m walk to the KRA terminus from the wharf, which was fine except it was up hill on about a 20% gradient and took 25 minutes! So I get there and only have a 5 minute wait. A KRA is cable car like the Skyway at Katoomba except it almost vertical not horizontal. The gondola is about 3 by 5 meters and holds about 30 people, standing. Got to the top and up to the railway and only had 5 minutes to wait, then up to the summit. The usual 15 min wait here then started down the other side, 4 minutes late. Another brilliant ride down through the snow and into the farm land and in to their Arth-Goldau station 4 minutes late. The problem with this is because of the massive reconstruction of Arth-Goldau station the Rigi has been cut back to finish 350 m from the SBB station and there was only 7 minutes to connect. I ran for it only to reach the top of the stairs as the train pulled out!!!
There was not another train to Goschenen for an hour and it wouldn’t get there until nearly 5:00 pm, too late. So I give up and returned to Luzern. I'll have to think about how to do the Goschenen Gorge tomorrow or Friday.
8 Jan 2016
Not much to report today, I did the walk around the old city trail and at 11:00 am it was 2C, by 4:00 it was 4C, I doubt it got any warmer than that. The other thing I did today was a boring administrative task [AKA washing, there are NO laundromats in Luzern but I found a good laundry who did a machine load in 3 hours for a reasonable price] and it was just off the old city trail.
That's about it; I spent the rest of the day resting. Moving to Interlaken tomorrow so tomorrows post should be more interesting.
9 Jan 2016
Had a good day today! Up early, to breakfast, finish packing, check out, put my bags in the hotel's storage room and off to the Bahnhoff to catch the 8:18 train to Goschenen. Now those who noticed that yesterday I said I was going to Interlaken today may be a tad confused as Goschenen is in exactly the opposite direction from Luzern than Interlaken! Well those who remember the day before yesterday will recall I was going there on Wednesday but was thwarted by a missed connection so I did it today.
Left Luzern on the 8:18 Inter regional express for Locarno. This took me out to the Zurich - Milan main line at Arth Goldau, then down this line to Fluelen, a section of the line I had missed when I came to Luzern because I took the boat from Fluelen last week, and so to Goschenen, arriving at 9:47. The train up the Goschenen Gorge left 5 minutes after we arrived and believe me that is one spectacular ride, even though it only lasts 15 minutes. All of is on the rack until close to Andermatt yard, a lot of it is in snow sheds fortunately open on the view side, there are rocks, mountains, rivers and one frozen river, the first frozen natural water course I have ever seen. I spent about 20 minutes in Andermatt grabbing a coffee and photographing some trains. Then back down the Gorge to Goschenen and caught the 11:11 train back to Luzern arriving at 12:41. Before anybody else comments yes, that was a 3 hour round trip for two 15 minute train rides with 40 minutes waiting around between trains. That's exactly the sort of thing I am here to do!
When I got back to Luzern I went and had some lunch, after that I got my bags from the Hotel and returned to the Bahnhoff.
I then caught the 2:05 pm Luzern Interlaken Express to Interlaken. They leave Luzern at 5 minutes passed the hour from 6:05 am to 9:05 pm. It's an odd looking train when you look at it. It looks just like the three car tram/train set I described earlier, but its 7 cars? OK two back to back sets BUT the noses have been cut off the inner driving cars and a normal end put on and a pretty standard buffet car connecting the two three car sets.
Now I go to get on board and use the wheel chair access as it is flat and leads directly to a luggage area, but the car has a raised centre area, about 4 steps which is quite high. So off we go and follow the route out of Luzern used when I went to Engelberg a few days ago, to Hergiswil, we then continue up another valley through very beautiful country side with very green farms, big mountains and very green looking, large mountain lakes. Next we come to Giswil which is the end of suburban service out of Luzern. Just beyond Giswil I find out why the carriage I'm in has such a high middle section, as we leave the station very very slowly, 2-3 kph slowly, then there is a bang and a thump under my feet as the rack engine engages! Now here is the tricky thing about rack trains, the rack engine MUST always be at the lowest end of the train. This is not a problem with trains that only have one rack section, you just keep it at the low end BUT today's train had, as I counted them, three different rack sections and sometimes it was going up the rack and sometimes down, so they had two rack engine equipped carriages! We wound our way up & down mountains, through small towns and villages and eventually found ourselves in Interlaken. A short walk to my hotel, where the first order of business was battery charging! Just about anything that could be used to take a picture was flat before I reached Interlaken.
10 Jan 2016
Another "not much to report day" I woke up late, it was raining [very drizzle type rain], took a while to get breakfast & get around. By the time I got to the station and checked out timetable & costs for the next set of local trips it was near enough to mid-day, too late to go up the mountains so I just wandered around Interlaken in the rain. Then went back to hotel to dry out a bit & have just returned from dinner.
So that was my day! Hopefully tomorrow will be better, as weather permitting; I plan to go up to Jungfraujoch, Europe's highest & most expensive railway station. Normal fare CHF195 [swiss Franc], about $A240, fortunately I have a half fare card which lets me do it for CHF102.
11 Jan 2016
In contrast to yesterday, today was a BIG day. I left Interlaken Ost on the 9:05 BOB train. BOB is a local railway that operates two electrified, meter gauge, rack lines out of Interlaken up into the mountains. The trains leave Interlaken coupled together until after about 15 minutes they reach the junction station of Zweilutschinen where the front half goes right to Lauterbrunnen and the back half goes left to Grindelwald. So the network looks like a Y with Interlaken at the bottom.
I was on the Grindelwald half of the train, which climbed up the river valley getting higher & higher through typical Swiss scenery for the next 25 minutes to Grindelwald. About half way up from the junction the country side started to become snow covered.
Here we change to the Wengenalpbhan, an electrified, 800 mm gauge, rack line up to Kleine-Scheidegg [KS]. After a short stop it off up to KS. We are really in snow country with actual ski runs & all. This line is VERY steep and quite slow and it takes us 35 minutes to reach KS. It’s here you change for the train up to the top of the Jungfrau. This is another 800 mm electrified rack line. It takes 50 minutes to climb up to the top, all but the first 10 minutes or so in tunnel. The train makes two stops inside the tunnel so that passengers can look out the viewing windows cut into the rock, unfortunately today at that level it was a total white out. By the time we got right to the top I was not feeling well, I knew straight away that it was altitude sickness just like Rod & I both had on top of Pikes Peak back in 12. I knew it was a possibility but this was about three thousand feet lower so it was worth the risk. I had a quick look around, still mostly white out and got the next train down. The 45 minutes we spent on top of Pikes Peak was just about the most miserable either of us could remember, I had no desire to spend 75 minute feeling like that!
By the time the train got back to KS, at 6,000 odd feet I was fine. The problem seems to cut in/out at around 11,000 feet, which makes a certain amount of sense as a pilot is not allowed to fly an unpressurised plan above 10,000 feet unless he is on oxygen.
From KS I got another Wengenalpbhan train down to Lauterbrunnen, the terminus of this end of that railway. From here I got the Lauterbrunnen Murren Bahn up to Murren. The first stage of this is a big cable car type gondola which goes up the cliff behind Lauterbrunnen station, probably close to 1,000 feet. Here you change to an actual train, an electrified, 800 mm gauge, single car train. Being only 800 mm gauge it can have very tight curves, which it uses to wend its way along a shelf cut into the rock along the valley edge for about 5 km to Murren. Stopped here for a very nice lunch, they have a very nice barley soup in this part of Switzerland, which I have become very partial to very quickly.
After lunch I retraced my steps back to Lauterbrunnen and caught the BOB train back to Interlaken arriving back at the hotel about 5 pm.
12 Jan 2016
Another fairly easy day as I did the lines planned for today yesterday! So I picked up the only other line in the area open in winter.
At 11:04 I caught the Interregio train going to Luzern to Meiringen, about half an hour east of Interlaken. Here I changed to the Meiringen Innertkirchen Bahn to Innertkirchen. This is a small, electrified, meter gauge line which runs 5 km along the banks of the river Aare through the Aare Gorge, although this section is in tunnel there is a request stop inside the tunnel that gives access to the gorge. The line ends just beyond Innertkirchen where it serves the workshops of KWO, a hydroelectric company which owns the railway.
After a 6 minute layover at Innertkirchen we returned to Meiringen. The train is a single carriage electric unit, somewhat tram like. It was well patronised in both directions being over half full in the middle of the day.
After a short wait at Meiringen I boarded an Interlaken bound train from Luzern and was back in Interlaken about 1:30 pm. After a leisurely lunch at the COOP restaurant in the Bahnhoff square, which has cheap food for Switzerland, I returned to the hotel.
Tomorrow I move on to Zermatt for two nights before catching the Glacier Express on Thursday, so more tomorrow.
13 Jan 2016
Interesting day today. I left Interlaken on the SBB's 11:00 am Intercity Express to Bern & Basel, but I only went 21 minutes down the line to Spiez. Here I was supposed to make a 12 minute connection to the Intercity Express from Basel & Bern to Visp & Brig. It was more like a 25 minute connection sitting on a windy open railway platform at less than 4C! Swiss Railways are not perfect!!!
When it did turn up it was a very nice double deck train. A swift run down the new Lotschberg route with its base tunnel and we arrived at Brig still about 11 minutes late. I could have rushed and probably made the connection due out in 5 minutes but Brig is a large station and we arrived at Glies [Platform] 5 and the connection left from Glies 14, which is not 4/5 platforms away as one might expect but Swiss railway stations have almost random platform numbering system. Glies 14 is over the other side of the station, out the door and across to the other side of the station plaza, with a big bus station in the middle of the plaza! So, given that I had luggage and couldn't use stairs and had to go up & down some long ramps I decided not to bother and had a very nice & relatively cheap lunch in the station buffet.
After an hours break I boarded the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn's 1:27 train to Zermatt. The MGB is a private, meter gauge, rack railway that connects Zermatt with Disentis via Brig. It is a very scenic route down the Rhone valley to Visp, then up a steep side valley through half a dozen small towns/villages to Zermatt. This got us into real snow country; my hotel had about 15 cm of snow on its terrace.
Got in just after 3 pm got my room, rested for a couple of hours then strolled around the village for an hour so, then had an early dinner and am now writing this laying on the bed.
I spend tomorrow in Zermatt, mainly to ride the Gornergrat Bahn up to the summit of the Gornergrat Mountain. On Thursday I get to ride the famous Glacier Express to Chur in eastern Switzerland, one of the highlights of the trip!
14 Jan 2016
Today's excursion was a relatively simple one up a mountain, by train, of course. Zermatt has two railway stations, the one used by the MGB that brought me here yesterday and just across a narrow street the station for the Gornergrat Bahn [GB] that runs from Zermatt to the top of the Gornergrat Mountain, 9.339 km away.
Zermatt is at a height of 1620 meters. The top of the mountain is 3089 meters so it’s pushing twice as high as Zermatt. For reference the Matterhorn is 4478 meters high.
The GB is an interesting little railway. Although it is in some ways a standard Swiss mountain railway, meter gauge, rack track, it is in other ways really weird. The weirdest is its electrical power system. It uses 3-phase, 16.66 Hz AC power at 725 Volts to run the train! That's a really weird system for a number of reasons, the main one being it means you have to have two contact wires on the overhead and therefore two separate pantographs where more normal ones have only one of each. The third phase is delivered via the track! I don't get why that does not mean the track is electrified but it is not. Wikipedia has a long article on 3 phase systems, if you are interested.
I left Zermatt on the "extra section' 10:48 am train. It was full of skiers and their gear; fortunately the trains do cater for them. We left the station via what seemed like a back alley, then on to a rising grade which quickly took us up out of the town. First up one side of the ridge, with Zermatt spread out below. It snowed in Zermatt and surrounds last night so everything was covered in snow, then through a tunnel to the other side of the ridge and up through a pine forest with the trees covered in snow & ice.
There are 5 intermediate stations and we crossed down bound trains at each of them. As we got higher the trees disappeared and we were in really snow country with ski lifts and skiers racing downhill, then lining up to go back up to do it again.
We got to the summit about 11:30 am, I got off and took a quick look around but it was -17C, wind speed 25 kph. I didn't stuff around and as all the places to see were a 50 - 100 meter walk, including numerous stairs [with my bung knee stairs are a problem, especially going down], all outdoors I quickly retreated to the station and caught the 11:48 train back to Zermatt, arriving about 12:30. Went back to the hotel & rested for a while [all this mountain climbing, even by train, takes it out of us old blokes!].
15 Jan 2016
One the "must dos" on this trip was the Glacier Express [GE] from Zermatt to Chur, today was the day! Got out of the hotel by 8:00 am, over to the MGB station buffet for breakfast [the hotel in Zermatt had no food available at all]. Finished by 8:30 and out into the station to find my train & reserved seat for our 8:52 departure. Found it, 4 th carriage from the rear end, get the luggage on board and stowed, coat hung up in the coat rack and settled into my seat.
Until a young [mid 20's] guy showed up with a reservation for the same seat!!! The train hostess checked both reservations and MINE was for YESTERDAY!!!!!! "Don't worry" she said "the conductors will sort it out when they come around checking tickets"
To say I was confused & confounded is putting it mildly. The best I can work out is the lady in Montreux who made the reservation mistyped the date from the printed itinerary I gave her and I didn't pick it up in the two weeks since!
The carriage is a very nice 2 nd class Panoramic car with big windows and eye brow windows, seating is 2 x 2 across with rows facing each other so you end up with mini compartments for up to 4 people.
Well the train got under way running down the valley from Zermatt into Brig. The conductors duly came around and found me another seat, which was quite satisfactory to me, so that was sorted and they issued me a new reservation slip. While this section is nonstop, according to the time table, it is still a single track railway and we still have to stop for trains coming the other way at passing sidings so it was slow going, we were about 15 minutes late into Brig.
We left Brig about 10 minutes down after some swift station work. From Brig the train climbs up into some of the highest and most remote alpine valleys in the Swiss Alps. The scenery is snowy and vertical as the train climbs it way up one valley then descends into another.
Before we get to the next major station we pass through the Furka Base Tunnel. This is what allows the GE to run in winter because before it opened in the 1980s the line over the Furka Pass had to be brought indoors each autumn. I'm not kidding! Each autumn all the overhead wires, track and bridges were dismantled and stored in the tunnels. If they didn't do this after the spring thaw there would be little of the railway left.
We were into Andermatt nearly 20 minutes early! This part of the railway is not nearly as busy as the Zermatt-Brig section. As Andermatt is a scheduled stop we had to wait here nearly 20 minutes for the timetable to catch up to us, so we were out of Andermatt dead on time. From here the railway gets steeper and twister as it climbs up one valley and into the next one. Just before we arrived at Andermatt they brought around the soup course for lunch, a clear beef broth with deep fried pasta balls in it. We had the main course, roast pork stuffed with prunes with potatoes & spinach as we climbed higher. Desert was sour cherry pie. The whole thing was very delicious.
By the time lunch was over we were at Disentis, where a 25 minute stop was scheduled as we changed railways there from the MGB to the Rhatische Bahn [ RhB]. This required an engine swap as well as a change of train operating crew which takes time. From here we pretty well run down the valley of the Voder [upper] Rhine towards Rhein-Schlucht. Here we enter the Rhine Gorge where many thousands of years ago there was a massive landslip when 1,000 vertical meters of rock plunged down into the valley over a twenty or so kilometre stretch forming a massive lake which eventually over flowed and cut its way down into the gorge we see today.
From here it was an easy run along the Rhine into Chur which we reached on time at 2:35 pm. For the first time on this trip I had to take a taxi to my hotel, arriving a bit after 3:00 pm.
Tomorrow starts my RhB local trips!
15 Jan 2016.
Fairly simple day, for me but it might not make sense to others without a map, so opening Google Maps in a separate window may help. Here's a URL for a map of the area I'm talking about: https://www.google.com.au/maps/@46.8469597,9.9076737,10z?hl=en
Today was what I call the RhB's local loop around the Alps. I started off taking the 10-15 minute walk down to the Bahnhoff through the new snow that had fallen overnight. First order of business was to visit the RhB ticket office and pick up my tickets for my "Footplate Ride" [aka cab ride] next Monday. The first lady I spoke to had no idea what I was talking about but the older gentleman next to her turned around to the 4 draw cabinet behind him, pulled out an envelope and handed it to me saying "I hope you enjoy your footplate ride"!!! While checking the tickets I heard him tell her about the "footplate ride" scheme.
I then caught a Swiss Federal [sBB] train to Landquart, where I changed to a RhB train to Davos Platz. Chur - Landquart is a bit odd as it has both standard gauge and meter gauge tracks, sometimes next to each other, sometimes somewhat apart. The SBB has no intermediate stations, the RhB has about 6. They seem to reserve the meter gauge services for local traffic but if you are going beyond Landquart either on SBB or RhB you get put on the SBB service.
From Landquart we cross the flat valley floor of the Rheine River, and then started up the valley of the Landquart River into the Alps. It started snowing lightly almost as soon as we left Landquart and got heavier and more snow on the ground as we got higher and higher.
We ran more or less to time through the beautiful scenery over rivers partly frozen. Got to Davos Platz and had half an hour to kill before my connecting train left for Filisur so I got a cup of coffee and a sandwich, a very nice ham & cheese sandwich made with local ham & cheese [or so the sign said!]. In due course I went to the platform for my onward train and watched them get it ready. They took the big, new, 3 car EMU [Electric Multiple Unit, like Sydney trains are] that powered my inbound train and put it into the platform to make my connecting train, then took the 6 unpowered carriages that it pulled and put them in another platform, where they attached an older 2 car EMU to pull those carriages on a local services to the various local ski field between Davos & Klosters for the skiers who were quite numerous by this time.
My connecting train left for its short 25 minute run to Filisur on the Chur - St Moritz mainline on time and arrived on time. The connecting mainline train arrived 3 minutes later and it was off to Samedan to connect to the Inn Valley line to Scoul-Tarasp. This line was intended to reach Landeck in Austria but never made it. The trip down the Inn Valley was very scenic and got snowier as we went along. Arrived Scoul about 2 minutes late!!
By this time I was starting to feel really tied so decided not stop in Scoul but get the next train back to Chur, which went by a different route. The route I took used RhB routes that had been in existence for a century but about 10 years ago a major changed happen to transport in the Inn Valley.
To explain properly a short digression is in order. Sometime in the 1990s the Swiss government decided it would not build or allow to be built any LONG car tunnels that individuals could drive through. The reasons behind this are long and complex so I won't bother with it here, so all new long tunnels had to be train tunnels that would carry cars on the trains.
So in due course the Swiss motorway department decided a new motor way was needed to the Inn valley and planned one, which the Swiss government knocked on the head because it had a long car tunnel included. So they looked for a suitable site and found one from Klosters, already on the RhB, to Sagliains, which was near the RhB Inn valley line, so a deal was struck and the Swiss government build a railway tunnel and the RhB got to operate both its own trains and the car carrying trains through it. The station built at Sagliains is a rather odd affair as there is no way to leave the station; it is only for changing trains.
So this is the route I took back to Chur and it was much faster than the traditional route. I got back to the hotel & collapsed, which is why no post last night. Today [saturday] I did an even longer train trip but I'm not going to write about that until tomorrow!
16-1-2016
The RhB runs two famous named trains. One is the Glacier Express, in conjunction with the MGB and which I wrote about my trip on it a few days ago. Today it was turn of the other named train the "Bernina Express" from Chur to Tirano in Italy. Scheduled departure time from Chur is 8:32; I leave the hotel just after 8 am and walk down through the fresh snow to the Bahnhoff. Got there in plenty of time, and then found the platform and the train. Seems the RhB really likes using EMU units as locomotives, like yesterday’s train from Landquart to Davos it was using an EMU as the loco, a BIG 3 car EMU for it was pulling no less than 5 Panorama cars behind it.
So here’s where a bit of confusion crept in, I knew that, unlike the Glacier Express, this was not an all reserved seat train yet the panorama cars had signs on them [in German] that suggested to my very poor "railway" German that you had to have a reservation. So looking around I spot the train conductor, you can't miss them, apart from the railway uniform conductors ALWAYS carry, when on duty, these small square looking shoulder bags with their railway's logo on them. So I go up to her [a very cute, tall, leggy blonde] who looked young to be a conductor and hence in charge of the train, and asked her. It turns out that the seats in the EMU are unreserved, but those in the panorama cars needed to be reserved and a supplement paid and she asked me if I wanted to a reservation for a panorama car. I said yes please, so she whipped a smart phone out of her shoulder bag and started looking at the reservation chart for her train and said it would be no problem and lead me into one of the cars and asked me to pick a seat, which I did and she reserved it then and there and said she would collect the supplement when came through checking tickets! Now that is what I call "the legendary Swiss efficiency"!
A word about these panorama cars. They are standard size meter gauge carriages; inside they are laid out in the Swiss standard 2 on each side of the aisle and pair facing the other. It’s the double glazed windows that are unbelievable. They start down about where your seated bum is and go all the way up and curve over and become the roof until about over the inside seat where it meets the solid part of the roof. In width they run the full width of the two seats facing each other, the window frames are about 20 cm wide, so the side of the carriage between the back of the headrest of the seat facing forward and the back of the headrest of the seat facing aft is all window bar about 10 cm on either side!
So we set off on time at 8:32 am, [the train appears to be about 40% full] and we head south back along the track I came in on the Glacier Express a few days earlier, to a place called Reichenau-Tamins where we swing east and head up the valley of the Hinter Rheine. It is at Reichenau that the Voder Rheine [upper Rheine] and the Hinter Rheine [Lower Rheine] meet to become the Rheine. The trackage between Chur & Reichenau is interesting as this is large industrial area and both the RhB [meter gauge] and the SBB [standard gauge] want to serve as many of the industries as they can which leads to some complicated track layouts including both "mixed" gauge [where two tracks of different gauges share the track bed] and "dual" gauge tracks [where there are three rails in the track, a common one for both gauges and then one a meter away and another 1.48 meters away].
Around this time the conductor comes around checking tickets and I have to pay the supplement, which I do, she then surprises me again by printing me a ticket for the supplement from the small ticket printer in her shoulder bag! The Swiss really do have their systems worked out!
As we move up the valley we got higher & higher on the side of the mountain and we could see that it was a broad & fairly flat valley. According to the train commentary this area has more castles for its size than anywhere else in Europe. There were quite a few visible in the distance; I think I got a picture of one. This valley has so many as it is a cross roads of three ancient alpine routes and is very productive. Look like a waste land to me all covered in snow, but what do I know about such things? We continued up the valley and crossed over into the valley of the Albula River and followed it all the way to its head in the Albula Pass. In order to climb so high the line uses 2 circular tunnels [do not make a complete 360 degree turn, but almost] and 3 spiral tunnels. After all this we reach the 5.865 km long Albula tunnel at 1788 meters above sea level.
After the tunnel we curve down the other side until we reach the Inn Valley line mentioned yesterday at Bever and on to Samedan where we take the left hand leg of the triangle to reach Pontresina where the Bernina line actually starts. From this point we start climbing and in 20 minutes or reach the Summit at Ospizio Bernina at 2,253 meters above sea level. Here we are running along the shores of Lake Bianco & Nair, this summit also marks the boundary between the Engadin region [Rhaeto-Romanic speaking] and the Puschlav valley [italian speaking], it also marks the watershed between the Danube River [black Sea] & the Po River [Adriatic Sea]
After the Ospizio the line drops a bit, and then climbs back up to another plateau, coming out of a long snow shed it pops out on to shelf at Alp Grum, where we have a 15 minute photo stop. Specular views over mountains, lakes and in the distance glaciers. But it’s very cold, I'd guess it around the -17C like on the top of the Gornergrat last week so after about 10 minutes I gave up when my camera was frozen! Went back into the very warm train, the camera took about an hour to thaw.
From Alp Grum the line descends steeply into the Puschlav valley via a series steep grades across the face of the hill, then a very tight 180 degree curve to go back across the face again only several 10s of meters lower. It did this 10 times before coming out on to the valley floor. We made a stop at Poschiavo, the major town in the valley then ran alongside Lake Poschiavo and on to Brusio. Just after Brusio we traverse the "open spiral" viaduct. This is a viaduct that does a complete 360 degree turn and the train passes both over & under the viaduct!
After that the line simply runs down the valley, passing through a few villages, two of them down the main [narrow] street and so over the border and into Italy and the town of Tirano. Here we spent 2 hours having a very nice Italian lunch [why is the veal in Italy so, so good?] and looking around the town a bit.
After the 2 hours we returned to the station and returned to Switzerland and Chur arriving back at 6:20 pm.
17 Jan 2016
Not much to report for today, it was scheduled as a rest day so that's what I did. Got up late, finished breakfast as they were shutting the dining room, went back to the room & dressed warmly then went out and wandered the medieval town of Chur for 2-3 hours, in the snow!
There has been a formal settlement here since at least Roman times & maybe much earlier, as it can control access along the Rheine to the valleys that lead to a number of major Alpine passes. The cathedral dates from the 13 th century. By the time I found my way out of the warren I was cold, grabbed some lunch [& hot coffee] and returned to the hotel.
Spent the rest of the afternoon resting, got some dinner about 8 pm, came back & went to sleep.
18 Jan 2016
BIG, BIG day today for today was the day of my Footplate Ride!!!
According to instructions I was to meet Josef, my guide for the ride, on the platform, at the loco at 9:40. I arrived at there at 9:30 BUT there was no loco, there was in fact no train but Josef was there. We introduced ourselves and he introduced me to the driver and then explained that our train comes in from St Moritz and was due at 9:03 and obviously it wasn't here. Train Control in Landquart was trying to put together another train for our service. We later learned that the original train was "delayed by ice" which could mean almost anything.
In due course a shunter engine pulled 4 carriages in from the yard. Nearly 10 minutes later a loco backed 6 carriages into the platform and coupled them to the four already there. This loco was "our" loco to take us to St Moritz. I didn't get a photo as everybody hustled on board to get going, we were late!
The loco was a GE 6/6 Bo-Bo-Bo, tri bogie articulated heavy freight loco built in 1958 with 2400 hp and a top speed of 80 kph. It uses the RhB standard 16.66 Hz AC current at 11,000 volts. The cab was quite cramped with 3 of us in it. The driver had his seat on the right hand side of the cab, I sat on a pull out stool in the middle and Josef stood on the left.
We were finally off about 12 minutes late. As this was my 4 th time over this stretch of track and I have described it in two previous posts I'll only mention it as it relates to the footplate ride.
We set off for Reichenau, this first section being the industrial area I described before with complicated track work. The first surprise of the day was that we used the dual gauge track! A definite first for me! When we got to Reichenau we took the left hand track and immediately started climbing. As we went along Josef and I discussed the signalling system and the somewhat bizarre vacuum/air hybrid braking system as best we were able. We got most of it across. We continued up hill, around tight bends [minimum curve radius 100 meters], over bridges and through tunnels, dozens of them ranging from 30 meters to 700 meters in length. Several of the tunnels were spiral tunnels and one in particular was on a 100 meter curve and even at 50 kph the centrifugal force was very noticeable in the cab.
We continued on, we lost more time due extra time waiting for trains coming in the opposite direction, because we were late train control advanced the crossing train to the next loop so at times we were waiting awhile before that train arrived. This made us about 20 minutes late out of Bergun. At the next crossing station, Muot we went into the siding for another cross with an opposite direction train, a freight train which arrived about 7-8 minutes later. But still we sat & sat & sat. The driver tried to contact train control by radio but couldn't get through so he pulled out his phone and rang them up, that got through! [Apparently the mobile phone companies had saturated the route with mobile towers.]
The problem was that some signals at Preda [the next station] had failed and the train there was trapped there! Much cursing in German was heard in the cab
. There actually is a standard procedure for dealing with this problem, pretty common to railways all over the world, and that is to fall back on written "train orders" [or in this case dictated orders over the phone] which details exactly what the driver can do/not do in the situation. So our driver wrote out & read back "his" train order and was told that the oncoming train was on its way operating on its "train order". But there was an extra problem, two of the six tunnels between us had doors operated by the signalling system and nobody knew if they were working! As a result the oncoming train had to slow to 15 kph until the driver could visually confirm that the doors were working, which meant more delays.
Eventually the oncoming train arrived and it was today westbound Glacier Express! When our driver could visually confirm that the opposing train was clear of our loop he could proceed. Just as he did the signals came back on and we were off. That was the last of the drama for our train but not for the driver, he was scheduled to leave us at Bever, 3 stations from Muot to take another train but as he was about 40 minutes late another was found but he was still to get off at Bever. So we swapped drivers at Bever but he only took us to the next station, Samedan where yet a third driver took over. He took us in to St Moritz where we arrived about 40 minutes late.
In St Moritz Josef and I had to get out on the "off side" on to the ground, go around the front of the loco and up onto the platform. No sooner had we got up on the platform our loco took off for its next train. Josef then showed me the way into the station and we said goodbye as he rushed to get the next to Chur. I had some lunch & a look around and got the next train back an hour later arriving back just after 4:00 pm, on time!
19 Jan 2016
First thing this morning I checked out of my hotel, but left my luggage there and caught the 10:08 train to Arosa, a ski resort on a mountain twice as high as Chur and one mountain range east. A beautiful trip with everything heavily covered in snow. While this train leaves from the station it doesn’t leave from the platforms but from the plaza in front of the station. It is a standard local 3 car EMU towing 4 trailers, they build unbelievably powerful EMU's in Switzerland!
The train turns out of the plaza and runs up a steep hill in the middle [single track] of a fairly narrow, two way street. The street basically follows the Plessur River up through the oldest part of town alongside the remains of the medieval town wall, until it gets outside of town where it suddenly dives across to the left and enters a railway right of way & almost immediately into a tunnel, the first of many as it winds its way up hill. It stays on the right bank of the river as it makes it way up through 5 of the 6 intermediate stations when it suddenly switches to the left bank via a pretty specular concreate arch bridge. It then continues up to Arosa.
At Arosa there was a 40 minute wait for the return train & I took the opportunity to grab some lunch & coffee. I made it back to the train with 3 minutes to spare. We then charge off down the hill, back the way we came. Fortunately the only stop within Chur besides the Bahnhoff is quite close to my hotel so I get off there to collect my luggage.
That's it this was the last line of RhB for me to ride, I've now ridden the WHOLE RhB!!!!!!!!! I am very, very stoked about this!
After grabbing my bags I quickly drag them down to the station to catch my next train, an Interregio SBB train to Rorschach on the shores of Lake Constance. Here I change to a very local EMU that continues along the lake shore to Romanshorn where I am currently typing this. The line from Chur to the eastern end of the lake basically followed the Swiss Austrian boarder. The trip was basically up broad flat valleys with very steep mountains on each side and totally covered in snow.
That's it for today. Tomorrow I give the trains a miss for a day and cross the lake by ferry to Friedrichshafen, the ancestral home of the Counts Von Zeppelin.
20 Jan 2016
No trains today! I got the 9:36 ferry from Romanshorn to Friedrichshafen this morning. Nice trip across the lake, pretty foggy but very calm. Arrived about 10:15 and went immediately to the target of today’s excursion: "The Zeppelin Museum"!
Amazingly good, unfortunately it's not big enough to have a real Zeppelin inside but they did have 30 meter, replica of the passenger cabin and surrounds from the Hindenburg. I was sitting on the [replica] promenade deck thinking “yes, this is how I want to go home next Monday!!! B787s & A380s be dammed!" Thought the same thing, even more so when I saw the passenger cabins, bigger than an Amtrak sleeper!
The rest of the museum had displays of artefacts, press reports, audio & video programs and some very good computer graphics, especially the one on how they built the 1930s monsters. I spent about 3 hours there in the museum and another hour having lunch. Food is noticeably cheaper in Germany than Switzerland.
The museum is housed is a restored & repurposed front building of Friedrichshafen's Harbour station which is right on the water front. Before there were as many roads & railways as today there were a lot more lake boats and trains would come right down to the docks to transfer passengers. The station is a beautiful 1920s Art Deco building, wonderfully restored. The current Harbour station is behind the Museum and is only a suburban station.
Got the 2:42 ferry back to Romanshorn, this time it was a car ferry with a very nice foot passenger cabin above the road deck, much nicer than the car ferry from Orient Point to New London in the USA back in 2012. Walked back to the hotel through the snow, luckily most of the foot paths had been ploughed so it wasn't too bad.
Tomorrow I'm off to Zurich for my last 4 days! :-( I can't believe how fast the month has gone. I start for home at 10:25 am next Monday [8:25 pm, Sydney time] arriving 7:15 pm Monday.
21 Jan 2016
Checked out of the hotel and got a taxi to the station, didn't relish dragging my luggage through the snow, it’s damaged enough. Got the 11:41 Intercity train that goes from Switzerland's boarder with Germany to its border with Italy but I only went as far as Zurich. The trip took 1:10 minutes, so we arrived at Zurich on time at 12:51.
Leaving Romanshorn the train set out in bright sunshine across a snowy landscape at the nice warm temperature of -4C! Once we climbed the hills behind the lake the landscape was fairly flat and rural for the first 40 or so minutes through our first three stops. After that the landscape got a lot more urban & industrial.
Arrival in Zurich was not fun. I knew it was an enormous station, I've seen aerial photos, what I didn't know was that there is a second set of platforms underneath the surface platforms! 24 on the surface & 22 one floor down! These are thru platforms unlike the surface platforms which are terminal, Needless to say we came into the underground station and I couldn't see the landmarks I had picked out to guide me! Eventually I found the head building; Zurich [like Sydney Station] is a terminal station [on the surface] with a big building between the end of the tracks & the street, hence "head building". As well there was a lot of construction going on as they are adding a THIRD level of tracks, at right angles to the other two. This level will be mainly for Zurich's new subway network, the first in Switzerland. The Swiss are weird in some ways, there is NO doubt they know how to build tunnels [you should see the Alpine tunnels] but they have refused to build an urban subway network until now. I think traffic congestion has finally forced them into it; the traffic around the main station is nuts, not just with cars & trucks but really big & long [bendy] buses and even longer trams. Haven’t seen any trolley buses, yet but I wouldn't be surprised. So I eventually stumbled on to a taxi rank and took one to the hotel.
22 Jan 2016
Not much to report today. Got up late, went for a self-guided tour of the old city including the Grossmunster [=cathedral], rode a couple of trams and the "Polybahn" which is a funicular from river level up the hill to ETH [switzerland's MIT or Stanford].
That's about it, came back to the hotel, had a rest, read and have just now returned from dinner. Tomorrow is the last day on my Swiss Transport Pass so I'll be training either to the area along the north west [Germany] or south west [France] boarders to see what I can find.
23 Jan 2016
Well today is the day I used my 15th & last day on my Swiss Flexi Travel Pass. I tried to pick somewhere I hadn't been but with interesting scenery. So I left Zurich on the 9:30 train to Lausanne, but not on the mainline but on the secondary mainline. This follows the mainline through Bern as far as Oltan, then heads further west via Solothurn, Biel/Bienne & Nauchatel to Yverdon-les-Bains where I changed to the private railway to Ste Croix.
The train from Zurich was not the double deck Intercity set I was expecting, rather it was a single deck set and at first I wondered about this until we got beyond Oltan when it became obvious that this was a tilt train set! I didn't know SBB had domestic tilt trains. The idea behind a tilt train is that it can go faster around sharper corners than a normal because the whole trains tilts to one side in the corners just as if the track was banked like a race track. The reason the track can't be banked is because the line sees various type of trains including fast passenger, medium & slow speed passenger and medium & slow speed freight trains. If you set the bank for any of these types the other types will grind up the lower rail very quickly and severely, so a tilt train banks the train, not the track.
The line to Ste Croix is a neat little meter gauge line using smaller versions of the Swiss EMU. It sets out across the valley bottom across farmland for a while then makes a sweeping left hand turn and head south for several kilometres and starts climbing, it then does a fairly tight 180 degree right hand turn and start climbing even harder, almost to the top of the Jura. The snow was getting deeper & deeper since the right hand turn. A short layover and down the hill, this time the view were fabulous with the Alps in the background across the lakes & valleys.
Got back to Yverdon and caught a local EMU down the line to Cossonay where I waited for the local to Vallorbe, which arrived on time and we headed back into the Jura. This line is interesting as it is the main freight route between France & French speaking Switzerland and was also the first route outside France for the TGV [to Lausanne], there is another route directly into Genève but it is much steeper & slower.
As it was getting late I caught the next train into Lausanne and changed into the Lausanne-Bern-Zurich mainline Intercity service at 4:20 pm, that got me into Zurich about 6:30 pm. This was a double deck intercity set, very comfortable and practical as I had no luggage today. Struck up an interesting conversation with a guy from Madagascar which helped the time to pass quickly.
God, Zurich Hauptbahnhof is a huge and confusing station, as well as the 40 odd mainline platforms & X suburban platforms it has a large shopping centre wrapped around in & under it with arcades that seem to go on for kilometre after kilometre. You'd have to live here for years to get a handle on it.
Well that brought my Swiss train wandering to a close, it has been wonderful and a fitting fulfilment of a 40 year old dream. All there is now is repack my bag, make sure I've got everything I should have and everything is in the right bag so I don't have problems with security and then tomorrow morning about 7:30 am its off to Zurich Flughafen [airport] to catch my fight home. I checked in online earlier this morning, using a computer the hotel has specifically to allow that as it has a printer attached, and printed both boarding passes to get me home!
26 Jan 2016
The Big Rap up!
I have just got home from the airport, exhausted. I left my hotel in Zurich on the 7:49 tram to Zurich Flughafen. Arrived about 8:20, I just followed the crowds and found the sign for which check in area Etihad was in [it was not obvious], there are 3 check in areas. Then you find which Row your airline is in [there are 8 in check in area 3. Check in, then clear outward Customs & security [the first was full when I got there so they opened a second one, then caught the tram to the E gates, where I finally found my aircraft.
So I caught EY74 to Abu Dhabi which was a new Boeing 787-9 which was interesting. Arrived about half an hour early, on a 6 hour flight. After a 2:30 layover I caught EY454 to Sydney a 14 hour flight! We were held for one hour on the tarmac, after doors were closed due to "airspace congestion" in Muscat.[i don't understand that either]. Despite the delay were arrived into Sydney dead on time at 7:15 pm. No dramas getting through Immigration & Customs into a taxi and home about 9 pm.
So that ends my month in Switzerland!
A Month on the World Biggest Electric Train Set
25 Dec 2016
I am sitting in a coffee shop at Abu Dhabi while connecting from my 14 hour flight from Sydney to my 7.5 flight to Geneva. We arrived 30 min early which means I have a 4:15 connection instead of a 3:45 one! By the time I reach Geneva I'll have been awake for almost 40 hours!!! Don't expect much in the way of posts until next week. In the meantime have a Merry Christmas (what you have left of it! It's 6:30 am Christmas morning here) & a Happy New Year.
I’m here! Arrived this afternoon after a flight on my all-time favourite big jet, a 2/3 empty one! Plus it was an A330 which is also a favourite as it has 2-4-2 seating. Because of the political situation when we reached the head of the Gulf we turned north east and into Turkey basically along the Iranian border to the Black Sea, then west over Bulgaria, Serbia and across to the Croatian Adriatic coast, then across the Venice lagoon and were still at 40,000 feet [more than 12,000 meters] as we passed between Milan & Como. He did what I've heard called a "bomb & weave" approach. He stayed high, then dropped like bomb, to a point, and wove through the "rocks" ie the Alps, I think we were higher than the Matterhorn, but I wouldn't swear to it, then down to Lake Geneva, still way too high so we had a very nice tour of the southern end of the lake before he was low enough to do the approach. Very good flying, you don't often get steep turns in a large passenger jet like that!
The Swiss were their usual efficient self, we landed at 1:20 [25 min early] by 1:55 I was on the airport station waiting for a train, as its a public holiday they only come every 20 minutes & I had just missed one]! By 2:40 pm I was checked into the hotel and sorting out my luggage.
Now having written this I'm going looking for dinner in an hour or so and then to bed.
26 Dec 2015
First full day in Geneva [or Geneve, in French]. Walked down to the lake and around the harbour which is where the lake empties into the Rhone River. Walked along the river for awhile hen caught a tram out to the north west suburbs then back thru the city to the UN area in the north east suburbs then back to the hotel for rest. Tomorrow is my first real train trip to Nyon & La Cure in the Jurra mountains, then Monday I move on to Montreux.
27 Dec 2015
Today it was time for the first of the train rides that are the real reason for this holiday! I took the 9:49 Regional Express [RE] two stations up the lake about 30 km, to Nyon from where I took the NStCM narrow gauge train up into the Jura Mountains to La Cure. Just to prove that the Swiss are not invincible in their railway timetabling this train connected to a "short working" that only went to St Cergue. So rather than spending 30 min waiting in a rather cold & draughty Nyon station I caught the St Cergue train and spent the 30 min waiting in a rather nice coffee shop 50 m from the station, then caught the next train to the end of the line and horror of horrors it was running 6 min late. When we arrived I tried to ask the drive how long we were stopping, but he would not hold still long enough to get two words in, he was really stressed and kept going to the other end of the train and climbed into the cab. I figured if he was that stressed I'd better get on immediately. Good thing too as he powered up and we were out of there!
It's an interesting line. Narrow gauge, 1 meter, electrified and climbs 1000 meters in about 30 km, that's steep for a train.
We got back to Nyon and I connected to a nonstop Interregional Express [iR] back to Geneva. I am going to spend the rest of today resting for my big day tomorrow travelling to Montreux and my second mountain railway.
28 Dec 2015
I left out of Geneva on the 9:30 IR to Montreux. Solid fog ALL the way! Lifted a little after we passed Lausanne, but not much. Found the hotel after a little searching, turned right instead of left and the Swiss are not any better at putting street numbers on their buildings than we are! Was allowed to dump my bags in the room before it was ready, which was good. Went back to the Gare and got the 12:23 IR 35 minutes back towards Geneva to Morges were I join the MBC train to Apples & Biere. I didn't do the branch to L'isle due to time constraints. The MBC is another local railway line in the Jura Mountains like the NStG&M in yesterday’s post. Not as scenic or as steep but still very worthwhile but it didn't get above the fog until almost the end of the line. I arrived back at Montreux about 4:00 pm. The MBC used to the BAM, I'm glad its not anymore because to me the BAM is the Baikal-Amour Railway which is an over 3,000 km long railway in Russia connecting Siberia to the Russian Far East [RFE] 1,000 km north of the Chinese boarder.
29 Dec 2015
Had a very important phone call this morning. As a result I was somewhat late getting started this morning so I went and talked to the nice ladies at the Golden Pass Centre which is the headquarters for the MOB railway which runs most of the mountain lines around this end of the lake. As a result I have a reservation for the front seat in the observation car on Thursdays Golden Pass Panorama Train up into the Alps to Zweisimmen. The thing about this seat is that it sits BELOW the driver! An uninterrupted view ahead!!! I’m looking forward to that.
So as not to waste a day on my Swiss Travel Pass I used the half fare card that comes with the pass to take the rack railway from Montreux to Rochers-de-Naye which is a ski resort high, high above Montreux. This line is not covered by the Pass. This is a classic Swiss mountain rack railway, very, very interesting. I have just returned from this trip, 90 minutes each way and an hour between trains.
More local trains from Montreux & Vevey tomorrow.
30 Dec 2015
Second day of local & narrow gauge rains out of Montreux. Took the 9:44 Golden Pass train weaving its way up the side of the mountain Montreux sits at the bottom of. This is actually the train I mentioned yesterday that I am taking tomorrow, but only for 45 minutes, the full trip which I do tomorrow is 3:00 hours. At Montbovon I changed to small local train of TPF. This looked just like the original trams for Sydney's Light Rail! [Checking the builder’s plate, they are off the same production line!] Somewhat better fitted out than Sydney's including more & better seats and a wheel chair accessible loo!
When we arrived it was sitting on the loop track waiting for us. Looking around it seemed it would follow the train from Montreux as we hadn't pass a junction on our way into town, but he tricked everyone, he headed back the way we came and then turned on the villages main street and proceeded about 1.5 km down streets and left town on the side of the road and stayed there for most of the trip to Bulle. Here he reversed in the station and proceeded to Broc end of the line. From here we went back to Bulle where I changed trains to a SBB [swiss Federal Railways, in German] for the run down to Romont on the Geneva - Bern mainline. While waiting to change trains I had lunch at the station bistro, the food was the same as Bows in the 1960/70!!! [For the confused, a local Chinese restaurant in Blacktown, at the time]. I then travelled down the mainline to Lausanne and changed for Vevey where I changed to the Blonay line. This is another narrow gauge mountain line that climbed up the mountain behind Vevey. At Blonay we changed to an even narrower gauge line to Les Pleiades a ski resort [currently minus snow] on top of a local mountain. From here it was back to Blonay change and back to Vevey then change for Montreux about 5:00 pm, the longest day train riding so far!
More tomorrow after my full ride on the Golden Pass.
31 Dec 2015
Today I took the "Golden Pass Express - Panoramic" from Montreux to Zweisimmen, the whole line this time not just the first 45 minutes of yesterday. It's a narrow gauge [1 meter, about 3'3" in old money], not rack but steep. It was a funny looking train. The thumping great [for 1m gauge] electric loco sat in the middle of the train, on either side of it were two 2 nd class panoramic cars with a 1 st class panoramic cars on each outer end. The outer two cars each had a driving cab above the front seats [not below as some documents said]. The front eight were extra fare reserved seats which I had reserved on Tuesday. Fabulous view out the front as one would expect, I have about 90 minutes of video.
As per yesterday the train wove its way up the mountain to Montbovon. This turned out to be a summit and from here the train wound its way along a river valley for about 30 km. There was some snow on the ground but it was very patchy, certainly none of the ski resorts had runs open yet. We continued along river valleys and over a couple more summits sometimes low down near the river, other times high up the valley sides on a rock shelf. Eventually we came down the side of one valley and could see Zweisimmen below us; the train then went into a horse shoe shaped tunnel on a steep down slope to emerge just outside town and so into the station.
At Zweisimmen I changed trains to a standard gauge train of the BLS railway which followed the river down to the town of Spiez on the Bern - Milan main line. This is known as the Lotschberg line as it uses the Lotschberg Pass over the Alps.
South of Spiez the line splits in two, the old line climbing high into the Alps to reach the original Lotschberg Tunnel and then plunging down into the Rhone valley to reach Brig. This is the route I took today. The new line stays MUCH lower and uses the new Lotschberg Base Tunnel, much faster but much more boring. From Brig it was a quick 90 minute run down the Rhone river valley to Lake Geneva and Montreux.
1 Jan 2016
A pretty easy day today. Just moved from Montreux to Brig an hour & half up the Rhone valley, very flat but surrounded by some v-e-r-y tall mountains. After checking in I went up to Kandersteg at the top of the Lotschberg Pass as I wanted to ride UP the south ramp of the Lotschberg (yesterday I rode down it) as it is a spectacular climb out of the Rhone valley at Brig, literally on a shelf cut into a sheer rock face. Turned around at Kandersteg, photograph some car carrying trains and returned to Brig. The Swiss do not like cars in long tunnels and have a policy of no more long car tunnels, all the newer tunnels are all train tunnels that also carry cars.
Tomorrow is a fairly big day, off to Domodossola in Italy where I catch the Centrovallie railway, another steep mountain railway back into Switzerland to the town of Locarno where I spend the night.
2 Jan 2016
Left Brig on a BLS local train to Domodolossa the first significant town in Italy on this train line. The hotel was close to the station so I got there a bit early and as the train started there it was in the platform a good 20 minutes before departure. So I got my bags and self on board and got a window seat facing forward and was still able to keep an eye on my bags. Then at about 5 minutes before departure FIVE young families descended on the carriage. That's 9 adults and seven children, four of whom were in strollers, but not what we call strollers these were serious cold weather, gear carrying, mountain climbing strollers! The 4 of them took up most of the luggage space in that carriage and threatened to drop my suit case into the door well! After a little bit of juggling around we got everybody accommodated and the luggage and bike space totally full!
This trip was over the Simplon Pass using the Simplon Tunnel finished in 1905. The tunnel is 20 km long and starts in Brig yard and takes about 20 minutes to cover. A lot of the run down the south side is in various shorter tunnels and snow/avalanche shelters, so not much to see.
We arrived in Domodolossa on time, half an hour after we left Brig, and got everything out of the luggage area. I expected to see a sign to the Centrovalle Railway but there was nothing so I headed for the exit and down in the subway I found an FS assistant who told me the way, back up on to the platform next to the one I had just come off, go along towards the end then down another set of stairs and turn left. So off I went, fortunately there was a lift down to the Centrovallie concourse and I made the connection with a small amount of time to spare.
The Centrovallie is another mountain railway, this one more twisty and convoluted than steep. The train itself is also unusual in that each carriage only has wheels on one end, the other end rests on the wheels of the next carriage [except the two end carriages, they have wheels on each end]. As a result of this it can go around curves much tighter than a normal train. I saw signs saying that curves were 64 meters, that's about 4 times smaller than was ever used on NSW railways. The carriages themselves were also unusual in that had enormous windows that made up most of the sides and they were slanted quite sharply so making the roof quite small. This made for fabulous views.
The trip was fairly spectacular; leaving Domodolossa we crossed open river flat fields until we came to the start of the hills when using those very tight curves it wound its way back and forth as it climbed up into the mountains. The name "Centrovalle means "a hundred valleys" in Italian and we certainly did cross at least 100 valleys, sometime on quite major bridges sometime small, many tunnels and along shelves cut from the rock. After about 2 hours of this we descended into one final valley into Locarno.
Locarno is a nice looking town, quite lush looking for this time of year, it's in Switzerland's "tropics" and on steep hill sides running up from the lake, unfortunately it started raining shortly after we crossed into Switzerland and hasn't stopped, not heavy just drizzly. I'm only here one night but I will put Locarno on my must come back to list.
Tomorrow I get the "William Tell Express" to Luzern, where I am for 5 days, so more tomorrow.
3 Jan 2016
Well today was an interesting day. Left Locarno at 10:47 for Luzern on the William Tell Express. The interesting thing is that the WTE is not an actual train, it is a through ticket on various services, you’ll see as today progresses. So I left Locarno in first class seat 64, car 2 on the IR 2422 to Zurich. Car 2 was a Panoramic car which had very big windows. So we headed down the branch and joined the main line at Bellinzona. From here we were on the Gotthard Pass line which runs from Zurich to Milan. This is a spectacular line with many high bridges, long tunnels including 4 spiral tunnels all with a backdrop of some very high mountains.
About 12:45 we arrived at Fluelen where I left the train and walked down to the wharf on Lake Luzern and boarded the good ship Europa. The Purser spent some time looking through my tickets then asked "Didn't you get the vouchers and info pack in Locarno?" Turns out I was supposed to be met at Locarno by a hostess, escorted to my seat and given a souvenir pack which contained the vouchers the purser was looking for! She dug around in her little office and produced one!
I was sent immediately to the 1 st class restaurant for lunch, which was a 3 course soup, main, desert fixed price meal, and the voucher covered about 60% of the cost. A very, very pleasant 2:45 was spent cruising down Lake Luzern while eating a top class meal, which started with the BEST pumpkin soup I have ever tasted. Meanwhile some of the best mountain/lake scenery in the world was passing by the window, including the Rutil Meadow where the original Swiss confederation was formed in 1291. About 3:45 we arrived in Luzern and my hotel was only 100 meters from the landing stage.
4 Jan 2016
Not much to report today mostly just rested & walked a bit in the area around the hotel. I did do one train trip, a two hour return trip to Engelberg up in the mountains south west of Luzern, on the narrow gauge Die Zentralbhan railway. Nice ride along the shore of Lake Luzern, then up a gently rising valley to its end, then the sneaky Swiss railway plan comes into play. At the head of the valley the train plunges into a tunnel, and you can hear it engage the rack. For those a little vague about it, the rack is a toothed rail laid between the rails and is engage by a cog wheel on the loco, this enables the train to go up & down much steeper track then otherwise. When we finally exit tunnel after 7-8 minutes you can hear the rack disengage, from there it was a couple of km to the end of the line.
Engelberg actually had snow on the ground, the first I had seen, up close. Snow was still fairly light and there did not appear to be much ski resort type action happening. Returned to Luzern, and had a nap!
5 Jan 2016
Spent yesterday climbing to the top of Mount Rigi [around 3000 meters], by train of course! Left Luzern by train to Arth Goldau, about 30 minutes, then waited 50 minutes for the Arth Rigi train. Another fabulous, steep, rack railway. For the first twenty minutes or so we wound up the hill side through typical farming country until we hit the snow line. From here to the summit it was through a frozen winter wonderland, the first real snow I had seen up close. Got some amazing picture [iF they came out] will try and post some tonight. When we got to the summit there was real snow about although only one ski run, out of about 30 was actually open.
From the summit I took the Vitznau Rigi railway down to Vitznau on Lake Luzern. From here I got a boat back towards Luzern but got off at Verkehrshaus, the stop for the Swiss Transport Museum. Well the railway exhibits were stunning but stealing the show was an actual Swissair Convair CV-990 jet airliner. A contemporary of the Boeing 707 & Douglas DC-8 it was and I think still is the fast sub-sonic jet airliner. It was a commercial failure and very few were made which means its very very rare. It’s certainly the only one I've seen! Along with the CV-880 I saw at Graceland in 2012 that completes my collection of early jet airliners!!!
After all that excitement a suburban train back to Luzern Bahnhoff [main station] was actually welcome.
7 Jan 2016
Well today was a bit of a mess. The plan was to leave Luzern on the 10:30 boat to Weggis, catch the KRA [no I don't know what it stands for] up to Rigi Kadstat, catch the Vitznau Rigi railway to the summit then the Rigi Goldau down to Arth-Goldau then a mainline SBB train to Goschenen then ride the MGB's narrow gauge rack railway through the Goschenen Gorge to Andermatt & then head back to Luzern. That WAS the plan! It didn't work out that way.
First off the 10:30 boat from Luzern was cancelled, so I had to take the 12:00 one. A careful reading of the timetable suggested it was still possible, so I gave it a go. Got to Weggis OK but nobody or book mentioned it was a 750 m walk to the KRA terminus from the wharf, which was fine except it was up hill on about a 20% gradient and took 25 minutes! So I get there and only have a 5 minute wait. A KRA is cable car like the Skyway at Katoomba except it almost vertical not horizontal. The gondola is about 3 by 5 meters and holds about 30 people, standing. Got to the top and up to the railway and only had 5 minutes to wait, then up to the summit. The usual 15 min wait here then started down the other side, 4 minutes late. Another brilliant ride down through the snow and into the farm land and in to their Arth-Goldau station 4 minutes late. The problem with this is because of the massive reconstruction of Arth-Goldau station the Rigi has been cut back to finish 350 m from the SBB station and there was only 7 minutes to connect. I ran for it only to reach the top of the stairs as the train pulled out!!!
There was not another train to Goschenen for an hour and it wouldn’t get there until nearly 5:00 pm, too late. So I give up and returned to Luzern. I'll have to think about how to do the Goschenen Gorge tomorrow or Friday.
8 Jan 2016
Not much to report today, I did the walk around the old city trail and at 11:00 am it was 2C, by 4:00 it was 4C, I doubt it got any warmer than that. The other thing I did today was a boring administrative task [AKA washing, there are NO laundromats in Luzern but I found a good laundry who did a machine load in 3 hours for a reasonable price] and it was just off the old city trail.
That's about it; I spent the rest of the day resting. Moving to Interlaken tomorrow so tomorrows post should be more interesting.
9 Jan 2016
Had a good day today! Up early, to breakfast, finish packing, check out, put my bags in the hotel's storage room and off to the Bahnhoff to catch the 8:18 train to Goschenen. Now those who noticed that yesterday I said I was going to Interlaken today may be a tad confused as Goschenen is in exactly the opposite direction from Luzern than Interlaken! Well those who remember the day before yesterday will recall I was going there on Wednesday but was thwarted by a missed connection so I did it today.
Left Luzern on the 8:18 Inter regional express for Locarno. This took me out to the Zurich - Milan main line at Arth Goldau, then down this line to Fluelen, a section of the line I had missed when I came to Luzern because I took the boat from Fluelen last week, and so to Goschenen, arriving at 9:47. The train up the Goschenen Gorge left 5 minutes after we arrived and believe me that is one spectacular ride, even though it only lasts 15 minutes. All of is on the rack until close to Andermatt yard, a lot of it is in snow sheds fortunately open on the view side, there are rocks, mountains, rivers and one frozen river, the first frozen natural water course I have ever seen. I spent about 20 minutes in Andermatt grabbing a coffee and photographing some trains. Then back down the Gorge to Goschenen and caught the 11:11 train back to Luzern arriving at 12:41. Before anybody else comments yes, that was a 3 hour round trip for two 15 minute train rides with 40 minutes waiting around between trains. That's exactly the sort of thing I am here to do!
When I got back to Luzern I went and had some lunch, after that I got my bags from the Hotel and returned to the Bahnhoff.
I then caught the 2:05 pm Luzern Interlaken Express to Interlaken. They leave Luzern at 5 minutes passed the hour from 6:05 am to 9:05 pm. It's an odd looking train when you look at it. It looks just like the three car tram/train set I described earlier, but its 7 cars? OK two back to back sets BUT the noses have been cut off the inner driving cars and a normal end put on and a pretty standard buffet car connecting the two three car sets.
Now I go to get on board and use the wheel chair access as it is flat and leads directly to a luggage area, but the car has a raised centre area, about 4 steps which is quite high. So off we go and follow the route out of Luzern used when I went to Engelberg a few days ago, to Hergiswil, we then continue up another valley through very beautiful country side with very green farms, big mountains and very green looking, large mountain lakes. Next we come to Giswil which is the end of suburban service out of Luzern. Just beyond Giswil I find out why the carriage I'm in has such a high middle section, as we leave the station very very slowly, 2-3 kph slowly, then there is a bang and a thump under my feet as the rack engine engages! Now here is the tricky thing about rack trains, the rack engine MUST always be at the lowest end of the train. This is not a problem with trains that only have one rack section, you just keep it at the low end BUT today's train had, as I counted them, three different rack sections and sometimes it was going up the rack and sometimes down, so they had two rack engine equipped carriages! We wound our way up & down mountains, through small towns and villages and eventually found ourselves in Interlaken. A short walk to my hotel, where the first order of business was battery charging! Just about anything that could be used to take a picture was flat before I reached Interlaken.
10 Jan 2016
Another "not much to report day" I woke up late, it was raining [very drizzle type rain], took a while to get breakfast & get around. By the time I got to the station and checked out timetable & costs for the next set of local trips it was near enough to mid-day, too late to go up the mountains so I just wandered around Interlaken in the rain. Then went back to hotel to dry out a bit & have just returned from dinner.
So that was my day! Hopefully tomorrow will be better, as weather permitting; I plan to go up to Jungfraujoch, Europe's highest & most expensive railway station. Normal fare CHF195 [swiss Franc], about $A240, fortunately I have a half fare card which lets me do it for CHF102.
11 Jan 2016
In contrast to yesterday, today was a BIG day. I left Interlaken Ost on the 9:05 BOB train. BOB is a local railway that operates two electrified, meter gauge, rack lines out of Interlaken up into the mountains. The trains leave Interlaken coupled together until after about 15 minutes they reach the junction station of Zweilutschinen where the front half goes right to Lauterbrunnen and the back half goes left to Grindelwald. So the network looks like a Y with Interlaken at the bottom.
I was on the Grindelwald half of the train, which climbed up the river valley getting higher & higher through typical Swiss scenery for the next 25 minutes to Grindelwald. About half way up from the junction the country side started to become snow covered.
Here we change to the Wengenalpbhan, an electrified, 800 mm gauge, rack line up to Kleine-Scheidegg [KS]. After a short stop it off up to KS. We are really in snow country with actual ski runs & all. This line is VERY steep and quite slow and it takes us 35 minutes to reach KS. It’s here you change for the train up to the top of the Jungfrau. This is another 800 mm electrified rack line. It takes 50 minutes to climb up to the top, all but the first 10 minutes or so in tunnel. The train makes two stops inside the tunnel so that passengers can look out the viewing windows cut into the rock, unfortunately today at that level it was a total white out. By the time we got right to the top I was not feeling well, I knew straight away that it was altitude sickness just like Rod & I both had on top of Pikes Peak back in 12. I knew it was a possibility but this was about three thousand feet lower so it was worth the risk. I had a quick look around, still mostly white out and got the next train down. The 45 minutes we spent on top of Pikes Peak was just about the most miserable either of us could remember, I had no desire to spend 75 minute feeling like that!
By the time the train got back to KS, at 6,000 odd feet I was fine. The problem seems to cut in/out at around 11,000 feet, which makes a certain amount of sense as a pilot is not allowed to fly an unpressurised plan above 10,000 feet unless he is on oxygen.
From KS I got another Wengenalpbhan train down to Lauterbrunnen, the terminus of this end of that railway. From here I got the Lauterbrunnen Murren Bahn up to Murren. The first stage of this is a big cable car type gondola which goes up the cliff behind Lauterbrunnen station, probably close to 1,000 feet. Here you change to an actual train, an electrified, 800 mm gauge, single car train. Being only 800 mm gauge it can have very tight curves, which it uses to wend its way along a shelf cut into the rock along the valley edge for about 5 km to Murren. Stopped here for a very nice lunch, they have a very nice barley soup in this part of Switzerland, which I have become very partial to very quickly.
After lunch I retraced my steps back to Lauterbrunnen and caught the BOB train back to Interlaken arriving back at the hotel about 5 pm.
12 Jan 2016
Another fairly easy day as I did the lines planned for today yesterday! So I picked up the only other line in the area open in winter.
At 11:04 I caught the Interregio train going to Luzern to Meiringen, about half an hour east of Interlaken. Here I changed to the Meiringen Innertkirchen Bahn to Innertkirchen. This is a small, electrified, meter gauge line which runs 5 km along the banks of the river Aare through the Aare Gorge, although this section is in tunnel there is a request stop inside the tunnel that gives access to the gorge. The line ends just beyond Innertkirchen where it serves the workshops of KWO, a hydroelectric company which owns the railway.
After a 6 minute layover at Innertkirchen we returned to Meiringen. The train is a single carriage electric unit, somewhat tram like. It was well patronised in both directions being over half full in the middle of the day.
After a short wait at Meiringen I boarded an Interlaken bound train from Luzern and was back in Interlaken about 1:30 pm. After a leisurely lunch at the COOP restaurant in the Bahnhoff square, which has cheap food for Switzerland, I returned to the hotel.
Tomorrow I move on to Zermatt for two nights before catching the Glacier Express on Thursday, so more tomorrow.
13 Jan 2016
Interesting day today. I left Interlaken on the SBB's 11:00 am Intercity Express to Bern & Basel, but I only went 21 minutes down the line to Spiez. Here I was supposed to make a 12 minute connection to the Intercity Express from Basel & Bern to Visp & Brig. It was more like a 25 minute connection sitting on a windy open railway platform at less than 4C! Swiss Railways are not perfect!!!
When it did turn up it was a very nice double deck train. A swift run down the new Lotschberg route with its base tunnel and we arrived at Brig still about 11 minutes late. I could have rushed and probably made the connection due out in 5 minutes but Brig is a large station and we arrived at Glies [Platform] 5 and the connection left from Glies 14, which is not 4/5 platforms away as one might expect but Swiss railway stations have almost random platform numbering system. Glies 14 is over the other side of the station, out the door and across to the other side of the station plaza, with a big bus station in the middle of the plaza! So, given that I had luggage and couldn't use stairs and had to go up & down some long ramps I decided not to bother and had a very nice & relatively cheap lunch in the station buffet.
After an hours break I boarded the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn's 1:27 train to Zermatt. The MGB is a private, meter gauge, rack railway that connects Zermatt with Disentis via Brig. It is a very scenic route down the Rhone valley to Visp, then up a steep side valley through half a dozen small towns/villages to Zermatt. This got us into real snow country; my hotel had about 15 cm of snow on its terrace.
Got in just after 3 pm got my room, rested for a couple of hours then strolled around the village for an hour so, then had an early dinner and am now writing this laying on the bed.
I spend tomorrow in Zermatt, mainly to ride the Gornergrat Bahn up to the summit of the Gornergrat Mountain. On Thursday I get to ride the famous Glacier Express to Chur in eastern Switzerland, one of the highlights of the trip!
14 Jan 2016
Today's excursion was a relatively simple one up a mountain, by train, of course. Zermatt has two railway stations, the one used by the MGB that brought me here yesterday and just across a narrow street the station for the Gornergrat Bahn [GB] that runs from Zermatt to the top of the Gornergrat Mountain, 9.339 km away.
Zermatt is at a height of 1620 meters. The top of the mountain is 3089 meters so it’s pushing twice as high as Zermatt. For reference the Matterhorn is 4478 meters high.
The GB is an interesting little railway. Although it is in some ways a standard Swiss mountain railway, meter gauge, rack track, it is in other ways really weird. The weirdest is its electrical power system. It uses 3-phase, 16.66 Hz AC power at 725 Volts to run the train! That's a really weird system for a number of reasons, the main one being it means you have to have two contact wires on the overhead and therefore two separate pantographs where more normal ones have only one of each. The third phase is delivered via the track! I don't get why that does not mean the track is electrified but it is not. Wikipedia has a long article on 3 phase systems, if you are interested.
I left Zermatt on the "extra section' 10:48 am train. It was full of skiers and their gear; fortunately the trains do cater for them. We left the station via what seemed like a back alley, then on to a rising grade which quickly took us up out of the town. First up one side of the ridge, with Zermatt spread out below. It snowed in Zermatt and surrounds last night so everything was covered in snow, then through a tunnel to the other side of the ridge and up through a pine forest with the trees covered in snow & ice.
There are 5 intermediate stations and we crossed down bound trains at each of them. As we got higher the trees disappeared and we were in really snow country with ski lifts and skiers racing downhill, then lining up to go back up to do it again.
We got to the summit about 11:30 am, I got off and took a quick look around but it was -17C, wind speed 25 kph. I didn't stuff around and as all the places to see were a 50 - 100 meter walk, including numerous stairs [with my bung knee stairs are a problem, especially going down], all outdoors I quickly retreated to the station and caught the 11:48 train back to Zermatt, arriving about 12:30. Went back to the hotel & rested for a while [all this mountain climbing, even by train, takes it out of us old blokes!].
15 Jan 2016
One the "must dos" on this trip was the Glacier Express [GE] from Zermatt to Chur, today was the day! Got out of the hotel by 8:00 am, over to the MGB station buffet for breakfast [the hotel in Zermatt had no food available at all]. Finished by 8:30 and out into the station to find my train & reserved seat for our 8:52 departure. Found it, 4 th carriage from the rear end, get the luggage on board and stowed, coat hung up in the coat rack and settled into my seat.
Until a young [mid 20's] guy showed up with a reservation for the same seat!!! The train hostess checked both reservations and MINE was for YESTERDAY!!!!!! "Don't worry" she said "the conductors will sort it out when they come around checking tickets"
To say I was confused & confounded is putting it mildly. The best I can work out is the lady in Montreux who made the reservation mistyped the date from the printed itinerary I gave her and I didn't pick it up in the two weeks since!
The carriage is a very nice 2 nd class Panoramic car with big windows and eye brow windows, seating is 2 x 2 across with rows facing each other so you end up with mini compartments for up to 4 people.
Well the train got under way running down the valley from Zermatt into Brig. The conductors duly came around and found me another seat, which was quite satisfactory to me, so that was sorted and they issued me a new reservation slip. While this section is nonstop, according to the time table, it is still a single track railway and we still have to stop for trains coming the other way at passing sidings so it was slow going, we were about 15 minutes late into Brig.
We left Brig about 10 minutes down after some swift station work. From Brig the train climbs up into some of the highest and most remote alpine valleys in the Swiss Alps. The scenery is snowy and vertical as the train climbs it way up one valley then descends into another.
Before we get to the next major station we pass through the Furka Base Tunnel. This is what allows the GE to run in winter because before it opened in the 1980s the line over the Furka Pass had to be brought indoors each autumn. I'm not kidding! Each autumn all the overhead wires, track and bridges were dismantled and stored in the tunnels. If they didn't do this after the spring thaw there would be little of the railway left.
We were into Andermatt nearly 20 minutes early! This part of the railway is not nearly as busy as the Zermatt-Brig section. As Andermatt is a scheduled stop we had to wait here nearly 20 minutes for the timetable to catch up to us, so we were out of Andermatt dead on time. From here the railway gets steeper and twister as it climbs up one valley and into the next one. Just before we arrived at Andermatt they brought around the soup course for lunch, a clear beef broth with deep fried pasta balls in it. We had the main course, roast pork stuffed with prunes with potatoes & spinach as we climbed higher. Desert was sour cherry pie. The whole thing was very delicious.
By the time lunch was over we were at Disentis, where a 25 minute stop was scheduled as we changed railways there from the MGB to the Rhatische Bahn [ RhB]. This required an engine swap as well as a change of train operating crew which takes time. From here we pretty well run down the valley of the Voder [upper] Rhine towards Rhein-Schlucht. Here we enter the Rhine Gorge where many thousands of years ago there was a massive landslip when 1,000 vertical meters of rock plunged down into the valley over a twenty or so kilometre stretch forming a massive lake which eventually over flowed and cut its way down into the gorge we see today.
From here it was an easy run along the Rhine into Chur which we reached on time at 2:35 pm. For the first time on this trip I had to take a taxi to my hotel, arriving a bit after 3:00 pm.
Tomorrow starts my RhB local trips!
15 Jan 2016.
Fairly simple day, for me but it might not make sense to others without a map, so opening Google Maps in a separate window may help. Here's a URL for a map of the area I'm talking about: https://www.google.com.au/maps/@46.8469597,9.9076737,10z?hl=en
Today was what I call the RhB's local loop around the Alps. I started off taking the 10-15 minute walk down to the Bahnhoff through the new snow that had fallen overnight. First order of business was to visit the RhB ticket office and pick up my tickets for my "Footplate Ride" [aka cab ride] next Monday. The first lady I spoke to had no idea what I was talking about but the older gentleman next to her turned around to the 4 draw cabinet behind him, pulled out an envelope and handed it to me saying "I hope you enjoy your footplate ride"!!! While checking the tickets I heard him tell her about the "footplate ride" scheme.
I then caught a Swiss Federal [sBB] train to Landquart, where I changed to a RhB train to Davos Platz. Chur - Landquart is a bit odd as it has both standard gauge and meter gauge tracks, sometimes next to each other, sometimes somewhat apart. The SBB has no intermediate stations, the RhB has about 6. They seem to reserve the meter gauge services for local traffic but if you are going beyond Landquart either on SBB or RhB you get put on the SBB service.
From Landquart we cross the flat valley floor of the Rheine River, and then started up the valley of the Landquart River into the Alps. It started snowing lightly almost as soon as we left Landquart and got heavier and more snow on the ground as we got higher and higher.
We ran more or less to time through the beautiful scenery over rivers partly frozen. Got to Davos Platz and had half an hour to kill before my connecting train left for Filisur so I got a cup of coffee and a sandwich, a very nice ham & cheese sandwich made with local ham & cheese [or so the sign said!]. In due course I went to the platform for my onward train and watched them get it ready. They took the big, new, 3 car EMU [Electric Multiple Unit, like Sydney trains are] that powered my inbound train and put it into the platform to make my connecting train, then took the 6 unpowered carriages that it pulled and put them in another platform, where they attached an older 2 car EMU to pull those carriages on a local services to the various local ski field between Davos & Klosters for the skiers who were quite numerous by this time.
My connecting train left for its short 25 minute run to Filisur on the Chur - St Moritz mainline on time and arrived on time. The connecting mainline train arrived 3 minutes later and it was off to Samedan to connect to the Inn Valley line to Scoul-Tarasp. This line was intended to reach Landeck in Austria but never made it. The trip down the Inn Valley was very scenic and got snowier as we went along. Arrived Scoul about 2 minutes late!!
By this time I was starting to feel really tied so decided not stop in Scoul but get the next train back to Chur, which went by a different route. The route I took used RhB routes that had been in existence for a century but about 10 years ago a major changed happen to transport in the Inn Valley.
To explain properly a short digression is in order. Sometime in the 1990s the Swiss government decided it would not build or allow to be built any LONG car tunnels that individuals could drive through. The reasons behind this are long and complex so I won't bother with it here, so all new long tunnels had to be train tunnels that would carry cars on the trains.
So in due course the Swiss motorway department decided a new motor way was needed to the Inn valley and planned one, which the Swiss government knocked on the head because it had a long car tunnel included. So they looked for a suitable site and found one from Klosters, already on the RhB, to Sagliains, which was near the RhB Inn valley line, so a deal was struck and the Swiss government build a railway tunnel and the RhB got to operate both its own trains and the car carrying trains through it. The station built at Sagliains is a rather odd affair as there is no way to leave the station; it is only for changing trains.
So this is the route I took back to Chur and it was much faster than the traditional route. I got back to the hotel & collapsed, which is why no post last night. Today [saturday] I did an even longer train trip but I'm not going to write about that until tomorrow!
16-1-2016
The RhB runs two famous named trains. One is the Glacier Express, in conjunction with the MGB and which I wrote about my trip on it a few days ago. Today it was turn of the other named train the "Bernina Express" from Chur to Tirano in Italy. Scheduled departure time from Chur is 8:32; I leave the hotel just after 8 am and walk down through the fresh snow to the Bahnhoff. Got there in plenty of time, and then found the platform and the train. Seems the RhB really likes using EMU units as locomotives, like yesterday’s train from Landquart to Davos it was using an EMU as the loco, a BIG 3 car EMU for it was pulling no less than 5 Panorama cars behind it.
So here’s where a bit of confusion crept in, I knew that, unlike the Glacier Express, this was not an all reserved seat train yet the panorama cars had signs on them [in German] that suggested to my very poor "railway" German that you had to have a reservation. So looking around I spot the train conductor, you can't miss them, apart from the railway uniform conductors ALWAYS carry, when on duty, these small square looking shoulder bags with their railway's logo on them. So I go up to her [a very cute, tall, leggy blonde] who looked young to be a conductor and hence in charge of the train, and asked her. It turns out that the seats in the EMU are unreserved, but those in the panorama cars needed to be reserved and a supplement paid and she asked me if I wanted to a reservation for a panorama car. I said yes please, so she whipped a smart phone out of her shoulder bag and started looking at the reservation chart for her train and said it would be no problem and lead me into one of the cars and asked me to pick a seat, which I did and she reserved it then and there and said she would collect the supplement when came through checking tickets! Now that is what I call "the legendary Swiss efficiency"!
A word about these panorama cars. They are standard size meter gauge carriages; inside they are laid out in the Swiss standard 2 on each side of the aisle and pair facing the other. It’s the double glazed windows that are unbelievable. They start down about where your seated bum is and go all the way up and curve over and become the roof until about over the inside seat where it meets the solid part of the roof. In width they run the full width of the two seats facing each other, the window frames are about 20 cm wide, so the side of the carriage between the back of the headrest of the seat facing forward and the back of the headrest of the seat facing aft is all window bar about 10 cm on either side!
So we set off on time at 8:32 am, [the train appears to be about 40% full] and we head south back along the track I came in on the Glacier Express a few days earlier, to a place called Reichenau-Tamins where we swing east and head up the valley of the Hinter Rheine. It is at Reichenau that the Voder Rheine [upper Rheine] and the Hinter Rheine [Lower Rheine] meet to become the Rheine. The trackage between Chur & Reichenau is interesting as this is large industrial area and both the RhB [meter gauge] and the SBB [standard gauge] want to serve as many of the industries as they can which leads to some complicated track layouts including both "mixed" gauge [where two tracks of different gauges share the track bed] and "dual" gauge tracks [where there are three rails in the track, a common one for both gauges and then one a meter away and another 1.48 meters away].
Around this time the conductor comes around checking tickets and I have to pay the supplement, which I do, she then surprises me again by printing me a ticket for the supplement from the small ticket printer in her shoulder bag! The Swiss really do have their systems worked out!
As we move up the valley we got higher & higher on the side of the mountain and we could see that it was a broad & fairly flat valley. According to the train commentary this area has more castles for its size than anywhere else in Europe. There were quite a few visible in the distance; I think I got a picture of one. This valley has so many as it is a cross roads of three ancient alpine routes and is very productive. Look like a waste land to me all covered in snow, but what do I know about such things? We continued up the valley and crossed over into the valley of the Albula River and followed it all the way to its head in the Albula Pass. In order to climb so high the line uses 2 circular tunnels [do not make a complete 360 degree turn, but almost] and 3 spiral tunnels. After all this we reach the 5.865 km long Albula tunnel at 1788 meters above sea level.
After the tunnel we curve down the other side until we reach the Inn Valley line mentioned yesterday at Bever and on to Samedan where we take the left hand leg of the triangle to reach Pontresina where the Bernina line actually starts. From this point we start climbing and in 20 minutes or reach the Summit at Ospizio Bernina at 2,253 meters above sea level. Here we are running along the shores of Lake Bianco & Nair, this summit also marks the boundary between the Engadin region [Rhaeto-Romanic speaking] and the Puschlav valley [italian speaking], it also marks the watershed between the Danube River [black Sea] & the Po River [Adriatic Sea]
After the Ospizio the line drops a bit, and then climbs back up to another plateau, coming out of a long snow shed it pops out on to shelf at Alp Grum, where we have a 15 minute photo stop. Specular views over mountains, lakes and in the distance glaciers. But it’s very cold, I'd guess it around the -17C like on the top of the Gornergrat last week so after about 10 minutes I gave up when my camera was frozen! Went back into the very warm train, the camera took about an hour to thaw.
From Alp Grum the line descends steeply into the Puschlav valley via a series steep grades across the face of the hill, then a very tight 180 degree curve to go back across the face again only several 10s of meters lower. It did this 10 times before coming out on to the valley floor. We made a stop at Poschiavo, the major town in the valley then ran alongside Lake Poschiavo and on to Brusio. Just after Brusio we traverse the "open spiral" viaduct. This is a viaduct that does a complete 360 degree turn and the train passes both over & under the viaduct!
After that the line simply runs down the valley, passing through a few villages, two of them down the main [narrow] street and so over the border and into Italy and the town of Tirano. Here we spent 2 hours having a very nice Italian lunch [why is the veal in Italy so, so good?] and looking around the town a bit.
After the 2 hours we returned to the station and returned to Switzerland and Chur arriving back at 6:20 pm.
17 Jan 2016
Not much to report for today, it was scheduled as a rest day so that's what I did. Got up late, finished breakfast as they were shutting the dining room, went back to the room & dressed warmly then went out and wandered the medieval town of Chur for 2-3 hours, in the snow!
There has been a formal settlement here since at least Roman times & maybe much earlier, as it can control access along the Rheine to the valleys that lead to a number of major Alpine passes. The cathedral dates from the 13 th century. By the time I found my way out of the warren I was cold, grabbed some lunch [& hot coffee] and returned to the hotel.
Spent the rest of the afternoon resting, got some dinner about 8 pm, came back & went to sleep.
18 Jan 2016
BIG, BIG day today for today was the day of my Footplate Ride!!!
According to instructions I was to meet Josef, my guide for the ride, on the platform, at the loco at 9:40. I arrived at there at 9:30 BUT there was no loco, there was in fact no train but Josef was there. We introduced ourselves and he introduced me to the driver and then explained that our train comes in from St Moritz and was due at 9:03 and obviously it wasn't here. Train Control in Landquart was trying to put together another train for our service. We later learned that the original train was "delayed by ice" which could mean almost anything.
In due course a shunter engine pulled 4 carriages in from the yard. Nearly 10 minutes later a loco backed 6 carriages into the platform and coupled them to the four already there. This loco was "our" loco to take us to St Moritz. I didn't get a photo as everybody hustled on board to get going, we were late!
The loco was a GE 6/6 Bo-Bo-Bo, tri bogie articulated heavy freight loco built in 1958 with 2400 hp and a top speed of 80 kph. It uses the RhB standard 16.66 Hz AC current at 11,000 volts. The cab was quite cramped with 3 of us in it. The driver had his seat on the right hand side of the cab, I sat on a pull out stool in the middle and Josef stood on the left.
We were finally off about 12 minutes late. As this was my 4 th time over this stretch of track and I have described it in two previous posts I'll only mention it as it relates to the footplate ride.
We set off for Reichenau, this first section being the industrial area I described before with complicated track work. The first surprise of the day was that we used the dual gauge track! A definite first for me! When we got to Reichenau we took the left hand track and immediately started climbing. As we went along Josef and I discussed the signalling system and the somewhat bizarre vacuum/air hybrid braking system as best we were able. We got most of it across. We continued up hill, around tight bends [minimum curve radius 100 meters], over bridges and through tunnels, dozens of them ranging from 30 meters to 700 meters in length. Several of the tunnels were spiral tunnels and one in particular was on a 100 meter curve and even at 50 kph the centrifugal force was very noticeable in the cab.
We continued on, we lost more time due extra time waiting for trains coming in the opposite direction, because we were late train control advanced the crossing train to the next loop so at times we were waiting awhile before that train arrived. This made us about 20 minutes late out of Bergun. At the next crossing station, Muot we went into the siding for another cross with an opposite direction train, a freight train which arrived about 7-8 minutes later. But still we sat & sat & sat. The driver tried to contact train control by radio but couldn't get through so he pulled out his phone and rang them up, that got through! [Apparently the mobile phone companies had saturated the route with mobile towers.]
The problem was that some signals at Preda [the next station] had failed and the train there was trapped there! Much cursing in German was heard in the cab
. There actually is a standard procedure for dealing with this problem, pretty common to railways all over the world, and that is to fall back on written "train orders" [or in this case dictated orders over the phone] which details exactly what the driver can do/not do in the situation. So our driver wrote out & read back "his" train order and was told that the oncoming train was on its way operating on its "train order". But there was an extra problem, two of the six tunnels between us had doors operated by the signalling system and nobody knew if they were working! As a result the oncoming train had to slow to 15 kph until the driver could visually confirm that the doors were working, which meant more delays.Eventually the oncoming train arrived and it was today westbound Glacier Express! When our driver could visually confirm that the opposing train was clear of our loop he could proceed. Just as he did the signals came back on and we were off. That was the last of the drama for our train but not for the driver, he was scheduled to leave us at Bever, 3 stations from Muot to take another train but as he was about 40 minutes late another was found but he was still to get off at Bever. So we swapped drivers at Bever but he only took us to the next station, Samedan where yet a third driver took over. He took us in to St Moritz where we arrived about 40 minutes late.
In St Moritz Josef and I had to get out on the "off side" on to the ground, go around the front of the loco and up onto the platform. No sooner had we got up on the platform our loco took off for its next train. Josef then showed me the way into the station and we said goodbye as he rushed to get the next to Chur. I had some lunch & a look around and got the next train back an hour later arriving back just after 4:00 pm, on time!
19 Jan 2016
First thing this morning I checked out of my hotel, but left my luggage there and caught the 10:08 train to Arosa, a ski resort on a mountain twice as high as Chur and one mountain range east. A beautiful trip with everything heavily covered in snow. While this train leaves from the station it doesn’t leave from the platforms but from the plaza in front of the station. It is a standard local 3 car EMU towing 4 trailers, they build unbelievably powerful EMU's in Switzerland!
The train turns out of the plaza and runs up a steep hill in the middle [single track] of a fairly narrow, two way street. The street basically follows the Plessur River up through the oldest part of town alongside the remains of the medieval town wall, until it gets outside of town where it suddenly dives across to the left and enters a railway right of way & almost immediately into a tunnel, the first of many as it winds its way up hill. It stays on the right bank of the river as it makes it way up through 5 of the 6 intermediate stations when it suddenly switches to the left bank via a pretty specular concreate arch bridge. It then continues up to Arosa.
At Arosa there was a 40 minute wait for the return train & I took the opportunity to grab some lunch & coffee. I made it back to the train with 3 minutes to spare. We then charge off down the hill, back the way we came. Fortunately the only stop within Chur besides the Bahnhoff is quite close to my hotel so I get off there to collect my luggage.
That's it this was the last line of RhB for me to ride, I've now ridden the WHOLE RhB!!!!!!!!! I am very, very stoked about this!
After grabbing my bags I quickly drag them down to the station to catch my next train, an Interregio SBB train to Rorschach on the shores of Lake Constance. Here I change to a very local EMU that continues along the lake shore to Romanshorn where I am currently typing this. The line from Chur to the eastern end of the lake basically followed the Swiss Austrian boarder. The trip was basically up broad flat valleys with very steep mountains on each side and totally covered in snow.
That's it for today. Tomorrow I give the trains a miss for a day and cross the lake by ferry to Friedrichshafen, the ancestral home of the Counts Von Zeppelin.
20 Jan 2016
No trains today! I got the 9:36 ferry from Romanshorn to Friedrichshafen this morning. Nice trip across the lake, pretty foggy but very calm. Arrived about 10:15 and went immediately to the target of today’s excursion: "The Zeppelin Museum"!
Amazingly good, unfortunately it's not big enough to have a real Zeppelin inside but they did have 30 meter, replica of the passenger cabin and surrounds from the Hindenburg. I was sitting on the [replica] promenade deck thinking “yes, this is how I want to go home next Monday!!! B787s & A380s be dammed!" Thought the same thing, even more so when I saw the passenger cabins, bigger than an Amtrak sleeper!
The rest of the museum had displays of artefacts, press reports, audio & video programs and some very good computer graphics, especially the one on how they built the 1930s monsters. I spent about 3 hours there in the museum and another hour having lunch. Food is noticeably cheaper in Germany than Switzerland.
The museum is housed is a restored & repurposed front building of Friedrichshafen's Harbour station which is right on the water front. Before there were as many roads & railways as today there were a lot more lake boats and trains would come right down to the docks to transfer passengers. The station is a beautiful 1920s Art Deco building, wonderfully restored. The current Harbour station is behind the Museum and is only a suburban station.
Got the 2:42 ferry back to Romanshorn, this time it was a car ferry with a very nice foot passenger cabin above the road deck, much nicer than the car ferry from Orient Point to New London in the USA back in 2012. Walked back to the hotel through the snow, luckily most of the foot paths had been ploughed so it wasn't too bad.
Tomorrow I'm off to Zurich for my last 4 days! :-( I can't believe how fast the month has gone. I start for home at 10:25 am next Monday [8:25 pm, Sydney time] arriving 7:15 pm Monday.
21 Jan 2016
Checked out of the hotel and got a taxi to the station, didn't relish dragging my luggage through the snow, it’s damaged enough. Got the 11:41 Intercity train that goes from Switzerland's boarder with Germany to its border with Italy but I only went as far as Zurich. The trip took 1:10 minutes, so we arrived at Zurich on time at 12:51.
Leaving Romanshorn the train set out in bright sunshine across a snowy landscape at the nice warm temperature of -4C! Once we climbed the hills behind the lake the landscape was fairly flat and rural for the first 40 or so minutes through our first three stops. After that the landscape got a lot more urban & industrial.
Arrival in Zurich was not fun. I knew it was an enormous station, I've seen aerial photos, what I didn't know was that there is a second set of platforms underneath the surface platforms! 24 on the surface & 22 one floor down! These are thru platforms unlike the surface platforms which are terminal, Needless to say we came into the underground station and I couldn't see the landmarks I had picked out to guide me! Eventually I found the head building; Zurich [like Sydney Station] is a terminal station [on the surface] with a big building between the end of the tracks & the street, hence "head building". As well there was a lot of construction going on as they are adding a THIRD level of tracks, at right angles to the other two. This level will be mainly for Zurich's new subway network, the first in Switzerland. The Swiss are weird in some ways, there is NO doubt they know how to build tunnels [you should see the Alpine tunnels] but they have refused to build an urban subway network until now. I think traffic congestion has finally forced them into it; the traffic around the main station is nuts, not just with cars & trucks but really big & long [bendy] buses and even longer trams. Haven’t seen any trolley buses, yet but I wouldn't be surprised. So I eventually stumbled on to a taxi rank and took one to the hotel.
22 Jan 2016
Not much to report today. Got up late, went for a self-guided tour of the old city including the Grossmunster [=cathedral], rode a couple of trams and the "Polybahn" which is a funicular from river level up the hill to ETH [switzerland's MIT or Stanford].
That's about it, came back to the hotel, had a rest, read and have just now returned from dinner. Tomorrow is the last day on my Swiss Transport Pass so I'll be training either to the area along the north west [Germany] or south west [France] boarders to see what I can find.
23 Jan 2016
Well today is the day I used my 15th & last day on my Swiss Flexi Travel Pass. I tried to pick somewhere I hadn't been but with interesting scenery. So I left Zurich on the 9:30 train to Lausanne, but not on the mainline but on the secondary mainline. This follows the mainline through Bern as far as Oltan, then heads further west via Solothurn, Biel/Bienne & Nauchatel to Yverdon-les-Bains where I changed to the private railway to Ste Croix.
The train from Zurich was not the double deck Intercity set I was expecting, rather it was a single deck set and at first I wondered about this until we got beyond Oltan when it became obvious that this was a tilt train set! I didn't know SBB had domestic tilt trains. The idea behind a tilt train is that it can go faster around sharper corners than a normal because the whole trains tilts to one side in the corners just as if the track was banked like a race track. The reason the track can't be banked is because the line sees various type of trains including fast passenger, medium & slow speed passenger and medium & slow speed freight trains. If you set the bank for any of these types the other types will grind up the lower rail very quickly and severely, so a tilt train banks the train, not the track.
The line to Ste Croix is a neat little meter gauge line using smaller versions of the Swiss EMU. It sets out across the valley bottom across farmland for a while then makes a sweeping left hand turn and head south for several kilometres and starts climbing, it then does a fairly tight 180 degree right hand turn and start climbing even harder, almost to the top of the Jura. The snow was getting deeper & deeper since the right hand turn. A short layover and down the hill, this time the view were fabulous with the Alps in the background across the lakes & valleys.
Got back to Yverdon and caught a local EMU down the line to Cossonay where I waited for the local to Vallorbe, which arrived on time and we headed back into the Jura. This line is interesting as it is the main freight route between France & French speaking Switzerland and was also the first route outside France for the TGV [to Lausanne], there is another route directly into Genève but it is much steeper & slower.
As it was getting late I caught the next train into Lausanne and changed into the Lausanne-Bern-Zurich mainline Intercity service at 4:20 pm, that got me into Zurich about 6:30 pm. This was a double deck intercity set, very comfortable and practical as I had no luggage today. Struck up an interesting conversation with a guy from Madagascar which helped the time to pass quickly.
God, Zurich Hauptbahnhof is a huge and confusing station, as well as the 40 odd mainline platforms & X suburban platforms it has a large shopping centre wrapped around in & under it with arcades that seem to go on for kilometre after kilometre. You'd have to live here for years to get a handle on it.
Well that brought my Swiss train wandering to a close, it has been wonderful and a fitting fulfilment of a 40 year old dream. All there is now is repack my bag, make sure I've got everything I should have and everything is in the right bag so I don't have problems with security and then tomorrow morning about 7:30 am its off to Zurich Flughafen [airport] to catch my fight home. I checked in online earlier this morning, using a computer the hotel has specifically to allow that as it has a printer attached, and printed both boarding passes to get me home!
26 Jan 2016
The Big Rap up!
I have just got home from the airport, exhausted. I left my hotel in Zurich on the 7:49 tram to Zurich Flughafen. Arrived about 8:20, I just followed the crowds and found the sign for which check in area Etihad was in [it was not obvious], there are 3 check in areas. Then you find which Row your airline is in [there are 8 in check in area 3. Check in, then clear outward Customs & security [the first was full when I got there so they opened a second one, then caught the tram to the E gates, where I finally found my aircraft.
So I caught EY74 to Abu Dhabi which was a new Boeing 787-9 which was interesting. Arrived about half an hour early, on a 6 hour flight. After a 2:30 layover I caught EY454 to Sydney a 14 hour flight! We were held for one hour on the tarmac, after doors were closed due to "airspace congestion" in Muscat.[i don't understand that either]. Despite the delay were arrived into Sydney dead on time at 7:15 pm. No dramas getting through Immigration & Customs into a taxi and home about 9 pm.
So that ends my month in Switzerland!
