Chris Tolley's "Roaming around Switzerland"

At the start of May 1997, I travelled to Switzerland with a touring party of the Basingstoke and District Railway Society. This page records my travels around Switzerland after the majority of the party had continued on their way back home from Switzerland to England. If you want to read about the journey to and from Switzerland, and the places visited by the Society party, click here. The hotel I stayed in was at Brig (it was the Hotel Victoria, and it was pretty good.)

Monday 5 May

Brig - Spiez - Interlaken - Luzern - Olten - Brig

I started the day in the company of the rest of the party on a train bound for Bern. Everyone apart from me left that train at Kandersteg, the northern end of the Lötschberg Tunnel. They wanted to observe the comings and goings of the car ferry trains that operate through the tunnel between there and Goppenstein.

From Kandersteg, I stayed on the train as far as Spiez, which gave me a chance to observe the way the train goes back and forth along the valley sides between Kandersteg and Frutigen to lose height. There were several interesting things to see at the station in Spiez, not least of which was the small electric shunting locomotive pictured above. Dating from 1943, this veteran was employed moving a Civil Engineer's train to and fro which carried a truck bearing a load of gravel. This gravel was emptied onto the platform as I watched, as part of the rebuilding work which was in progress.

Another interesting sight at Spiez is the signal box - shown above. The brushes mounted on a pole near it seemed mysterious at first until I looked more closely ay the layout of the tracks. Then it was apparent that the purpose of the brushes was to deter passengers who might want to lean out of the windows to wave to friends on the platform as their train leaves - better to be clouted by a brush than the signal box wall!

Class De110 locomotive number 110-002-3 of the SBB Brünig-Bahn at Interlaken Öst.
This Bo-Bo locomotive dates from 1941, and was recently renumbered from 908, when its
rack equipment was removed. (Others of this design which retain their rack gear are
numbered in the 120-xxx-x series.)

From Spiez, I went on to Interlaken Öst. As its name suggests, Interlaken is situated between two lakes, the Thuner See to the west, and the Brienzer See to the east. Between Spiez and Interlaken, the train hugs the coast of the Thuner See, giving memorable views. The weather, which had been overcast since the start of the day, turned to rain at this point. I was pleased when the Brünig-Bahn train drew in, as it meant I could sit in the dry. The Brünig train took me to Luzern, but locomotive 110-002-3, which had hauled the train as far as Meiringen was left behind there as new (i.e. 1989-built) locomotive no. 101-964-5 took the train over the Brünig Pass and on to Luzern (see below). This route also starts off along the coast of a lake - this time the Brienzer See.

Bo-Bo Locomotive no. 101-964-5 stands at Luzern, having arrived with the service from Interlaken.

Apologies for the poor quality of the picture - there isn't much light in Luzern station on a dull day, and I had to take such liberties with the original photo that I thought it better to reproduce it here in black and white! If you'd like an idea of what these locomotives look like, they are superficially very similar to the class HGe4/4^II locomotives of the Furka-Oberalp Bahn. Click here to see a picture of one of those.

The reason for heading for Luzern, was to visit the Verkehrshaus der Schweiz (Swiss Museum of Transport and Communication). (See below.) The rain didn't abate, as the external photos show.

Whilst this museum turned out to be full of (indeed, absolutely crammed with) interesting exhibits, ranging in size from unicycles to airliners, I spent my time, naturally enough, in the railway section. (There is also an I-MAX cinema at the site, but I ignored that as well.) The locomotives and other stock and railwayana on show did present a good cross-section of the history of Swiss railways - both public and private. Unfortunately, I couldn't take the kind of photos I wanted there to do it justice for two reasons. First, there was insufficient light due to the dullness of the weather. Second, and this can't really be helped without thinning the exhibits out, there was, if anything, too much there, and often one exhibit would block the line of sight to another while composing the pictures; ah well, c'est la vie!


Two pictures of lakes to finish Monday's reporting: on the left is the Bieler See, photographed near Twann, which is between Biel and Neuchâtel. On the right is a view of evening sunshine across lake Geneva, photographed near Montreux.

After returning to Luzern, the question arose of where to go next. This is confession time, and I have two. First, I hadn't planned this day out beyond getting to Luzern, and second, I now made a mistake. I knew, you see, that it was possible to get from Bern to Brig. Armed with this information, I looked for a train to Bern. Except I didn't. By a brainstorm, I managed to convince myself I wanted a train for Basel. I found one, boarded it and it duly departed. After it had been going for a while, I looked at a map, to see how long it would be before I was at Bern. It didn't take long (passing through two stations, in fact) for me to realise that I was on a train going in the wrong direction. So, take this in: I'm on a train going the wrong way, and I have no timetable, and I don't speak German beyond the ordering a coffee stage. What should I do? I ordered a coffee, and thought about it. It seemed to me that what I needed to do was get off at the next main station and look for a train back to Luzern. The next main station was Olten.

I got off at Olten, and looked for a train to Luzern. In fact, only 7 minutes after I arrived, there was a train to Brig! So I boarded that and stayed on it all the way to Brig. I couldn't have planned a better tour of Switzerland. The train took me through Solothurn, Biel, Neuchâtel, passing some very picturesque lakes, and on to Yverdon, Lausanne, Martigny and then Brig. This happy accident got me back to Brig for 8pm, which wasn't too bad, and I didn't mind too much that the train seemed to stop everywhere between Lausanne and Brig!

Tuesday 6 May

Brig - Andermatt - Disentis - Chur - Zürich - Bern - Spiez - Brig

The rear of the train to Andermatt standing at Brig FO/BVZ station,
illustrating that the Fürka-Oberalp trains are push-pull.

On Tuesday, I set off from Brig in a completely different direction - this time on the Fürka-Oberalp line to Andermatt, which I won't go into detail about here, as it's covered in the report of the earlier part of the trip.

Between Andermatt and Disentis, the FO line gets very high. Looking down into the valley near
Tschamut, as in the first picture, you could be excused for thinking that the fences have been put
on the mountainside to catch trains falling off the line. In fact, they are to hold the snow in place
to prevent avalanches. As the second picture, also taken on this stretch of line, shows,
glaciers really can look like frozen rivers, sometimes.

From Andermatt, it was on to new territory - eastwards to Disentis. The highest part of the FO line is on this section - near Oberalppass. In fact the station there is almost exactly a mile higher than the foot of the line at Brig. Even in May, much of this section was in the snow. Once past the summit, going towards Disentis, the valley is that of the headwaters of the Rhine.


Left: At Disentis, the FO train draws in to platform 2, whilst a train of the Rhätische-Bahn, headed by Bo-Bo class Ge4/4^II locomotive 629 Tiefencastel stands at platform 3, waiting to work to Chur. Right: the mountains form the backdrop to a delightful little church at Trun.

At Disentis, I changed to a train operated by the Rhätische-Bahn, which is built to the same 1000mm gauge as the FO system. Once again, the weather had taken a turn for the worse. Even so, the countryside continued to be spectacular, and this was nowhere more true than in the second half of this journey to Chur, where the track was at river level in a gorge made up of apparently softish rock, with many barriers by the trackside to catch falling boulders. (I can't help feeling that the Swiss railway engineers have sometimes taken more of a risk than I would have done, if I had been building the lines...)


Left: here I am, looking at the wet weather, and no doubt hoping that it would clear up. Right: This is what Cartier-Bresson might have called the critical moment: the very instant that another train passes on the adjacent track - closing speed 250 kilometres per hour. Definitely a lucky picture.

At Chur, I changed to a train operated by SBB, this time on the standard gauge. The destination for this one was Zürich. En route, it passed through Sargans, which gave me a glimpse through the rain of yet another country. The mountains I could see were in Liechtenstein. (Some in the background might, on a sunny day, have been in Austria, but there was no chance of seeing that far on this particular Tuesday!) There was a brief moment of railway interest as the train passed through Wädenswil, because there was one of the new class 460 locomotives standing there in shiny unpainted condition, as part of the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Swiss railways.

At Zürich, one of the new class 450 locomotives stands at the buffer-stops
with its double-decker coaches This is 450-024-5 Pfungen, waiting to operate
a service to Pfäffikon (SZ).

There wasn't much time between connections to appreciate the finer points of Zürich, but I did get my first chance to see some of the recently-delivered double-deck stock close up - see above. Soon, I was again on the move, this time to Bern. Travelling westwards, I must have been going towards where the weather was coming from, because soon the train I was on was in bright sunshine, and Zürich was the last place I saw in the rain that day.

A German ICE train, led by 401-575-6, stands at Bern, while operating a
Berlin Zoo to Interlaken service. ICE is definitely a cool train to travel on!

The interior of an ICE train is, if anything, even more appealing than the outside. To begin with, the train is huge. If you're at a window seat, you probably need a telephone to speak to the person on the opposite side of the coach. On top of that, it's luxurious. The seats really are comfortable. They're big enough even for me. Add to this an exceptionally smooth ride, and electronic panels at the ends of the coaches to tell you what train you're on, where it's calling next and how well you're keeping to the schedule, and I don't think there's anything missing from the design. Can I have another go please...

At Bern, there was a highlight for me on this trip (one of many) because I had the chance to travel aboard an ICE train as far as Spiez. My comments about the train are given as the captions to the pictures above. It's a pity it's so quick in some ways. I wanted to be on it longer! Now, if you've read my other railway pages, you'll know I'm not one who supports the railway privatisation that has happened in this country, but if any of the private companies come up with a train nearly as good as the ICE, I'll reconsider.

This is the prospect of Brig you see when approaching along the BLS line.
This photograph was taken about 2 kilometres away from the station.
(In a country where nearly all the railways are electrified, it is almost
impossible to take a picture without a catenary support mast in it!)

Wednesday 7 May

Brig - Lausanne - Bern - Thun - Spiez - Zweisimmen - Montreux - Brig

Weather-wise, Wednesday didn't start off too promisingly. The weather at Brig was dull, but there was at least the chance of another ride on a Cisalpino Pendolino train to look forward to. As a sign of how localised weather conditions can sometimes be in the Swiss valleys, it's worth noting that the weather was bright and sunny just ten miles away.

The sleek profile of Cisalpino ETR.470 set number 1, at Lausanne on 7 May 1997.

One of the more unusal photographs of Lausanne station:
looking directly upwards below the lights in the main ticket hall.

At Lausanne, I had the opportunity to explore the station, which has recently been renovated. The stonework is clean and bright, and the interior looks very special. The Olympic emblem of five linked rings is mounted above the station entrance, in recognition of the fact that the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee is nearby. From Lausanne, I boarded a train for Bern. Almost immediately after leaving Lausanne, that train began a steady climb towards Palézieux, at first westwards parallel with the shore of Lake Geneva, and then after a while more or less due north away from the lake. The main intermediate town between Lausanne and Bern is Fribourg, but otherwise, the countryside was almost uninterrupted.

The electric multiple-unit train which brought me from Bern to Thun,
standing at its destination

From Bern, I decided to make a slow journey to Thun on the local line which passes through Belp and Kaufdorf. This was a very pleasant journey, with the green of the nearby flat landscape contrasting with the blue and white of the snow-capped mountains in the distance. A brief wait at Thun, and then I was under way again to Spiez, where I changed yet again, into a train bound for Zweisimmen.


Two trains at Zweisimmen. On the left is the standard-gauge train of the BLS Simmenthalbahn - on which I arrived, while on the right is a metre-gauge loco and coaches of the Montreux-Oberland Bernois railway - on which I left.

Again the countryside between Spiez and Zweisimmen is beautiful - a word which seems to get worn out describing the Swiss landscape. The station at Zweisimmen is unexpectedly large, considering the apparently small settlement it serves; but then it is a three-way junction. In addition to the line from Spiez, there is a line to Lenk, and another to Montreux. It was to Montreux that I continued.

There are many interesting things about the railway between Zweisimmen and Montreux, but in various places, and especially at the Montreux end it is not for the faint-hearted. After several days in Switzerland, I had grown accustomed to railways being rack-assisted up and down steep inclines. There aren't any racks in evidence on this stretch of line, but it's still steep. The mountainous landscape was on this day not covered by snow, but it was easy to see why somewhere like Gstaad would be popular if it were.


Left: seen from the MOB train at Montbovon, a train of the Chemins de Fer Fribourgeois, apparently advertising the local Big Cheese - La Gruyère (though it could just be named after the valley in which it runs). Right: From Montreux (where this picture was taken) back to Brig, I travelled behind locomotive 11344.

By the time I returned to Montreux, the weather looked as if it would soon be changing for the worse. It was still quite warm, but the blue sky was now obscured by clouds. The train I caught to Brig was quite crowded - my own fault for travelling between 1600 and 1800, I suppose. A woman sitting opposite me on this journey seemed interested in the fact that I was logging the train, and said something to me, which I thought was a question about what I was doing. I summoned up my best French, which in fact isn't too bad on a good day, to try to describe the procedure, but she looked blank. After a pause, she said something else to me, and I relaised that whatever she was speaking, it wasn't French. (I don't think it was Italian or German either, so I do hope that my description didn't amount to an insult in whatever language it was she was using!) Apart from that, the trip along the Rhône valley to Brig was uneventful. One thing which did surprise me was the number of vineyards on the lower slopes of the valley - I can't recall having heard much about Swiss wine in the past.

Thursday 8 May

Brig - Bern - St. Gallen - Rorshach - St. Gallen - Arth-Goldau - Göschenen - Andermatt - Brig

An early-morning view south along the Bahnhofstrasse in Brig.
That's new snow on the mountain in the background.

Thursday started off much cooler than Wednesday had. This seemed to be because it had snowed on the higher ground around the town. Although I had by this time acquired a rail timetable (not without difficulty, I might add, because the start of May isn't the best time to try to get one which has been current since the previous June) the itinerary that I had before me was actually planned before setting off, by using the information available on the Internet at the Official SBB/CFF/FFS site. It was quite an ambitious one, designed to take me to the far north east of the country. This was a day when the trains just had to be on time, because of the tight connections, otherwise I would have been stranded somewhere...


As soon as the train had climbed into the mountains on the BLS line, it became apparent that the overnight snowfall had been quite heavy. Places that had been green two days before were now (greyish) white. At Kandersteg, there were several inches of snow.

The impression I had about the weather was strongly confirmed during the first train ride of the day, which took me from Brig to Bern along the BLS route again. Yet, it didn't seem to make any difference at all to the trains, or to the people on them. (Except that there did seem to be more people travelling, but this could have been an illusion, or due to some other reason than the weather.) At Bern, there was the first tight connection of the day, into a train bound for St. Gallen. This seemed to be an extremely long train, and I had a fancy of taking a picture from the back of it as it went round a curve, to include the whole length. As it happened, there didn't seem to be any curves long enough to accommodate the whole train, so there's no picture!


Left: an SBB service at St. Gallen, operated by a railcar/trailer set headed by no. 540-049-4. Right, a two-car train of the metre-gauge Trogenerbahn outside the main station.

At St. Gallen, there was a railway exhibition as part of the 150th celebrations,
a couple of days after my visit - it was the thought that there might already have
been an interesting collection of rolling stock assembled that attracted me there.

As I travelled northwards, there was no further evidence of snow, but there was plenty of rain in the air. This was something of a disincentive to the photographer in me. I had planned the trip to give me a chance of seeing some of the historical items which were due to be displayed at St.Gallen over the following weekend. Anyway, whilst it was true that there were some old locomotives and coaches stabled in the yard, there weren't many, and those that were there were too far from any cover to be seen without getting drenched. I expect that's a sign of Swiss efficiency - get the exhibition together exactly when it's needed, and not a moment earlier! On the other hand, the waiting hall at the station was full of television people, and a special stage had been set up for filming. Odd, that, I thought - no trains but the TV was on hand; I sighed and supposed it meant that the media in Switzerland were no more interested in the trains than they were in Britain!

After eating a filled roll at St. Gallen (first time I'd had mozzarella anywhere else than on a pizza, and it was very pleasant!) I set off on the short trip to Rorschach and back. I didn't have many expectations for that trip beyond perhaps being able to see Germany across the Bodensee. Well, I could make out some hazy shapes through the drizzle, so I may have seen Germany. While there, my eye was caught by the scarlet livery of a locomotive standing in the sidings. The coaches and wagons coupled to it included a couple of tank wagons, and people have been kind enough to explain that it is used for fire-fighting. On the down-side, my eye was also caught by a coach painted in a livery presumably intended to appeal to people of the younger variety - below. (I must confess, my first thought was that a graffiti artist had been playing.) Anyway, this is a "kinderwagon" - a coach specially designed for families, and incorporating a children's play area.

One could be forgiven for concluding that there was a "silly livery" competition arranged to coincide with the rail show at St. Gallen. The coach above at was seen at Rorschach and the locomotive below at St. Gallen. The loco livery celebrates sights which can be seen along the "Voralpen-Express" route between Rorschach and Luzern.

If the coach at Rorschach was odd, there was worse to come when I returned to St. Gallen. In the hour or so I had been away, the TV crew had been quite busy. One of the Bodensee-Toggenburg Bahn locomotives was standing at the station in a very peculiar livery, coupled to a flat wagon and two coaches with verandah-ends. There was a pop group on the flat wagon, playing music while upwards of a hundred children danced around the platform and through the old coaches. I had obviously not been that mistaken in my earlier assessment of the TV crew... Luckily, there wasn't long to wait for my next train to Arth-Goldau, this was also hauled by one of the B-T locomotives, but this time in a more restrained livery!


Left: shunting loco no. 52 of the Schweizerische Südostbahn at Biberugg Right: everywhere you turn in Switzerland, there's another picture postcard scene.

The line from St. Gallen to Arth-Goldau includes a couple of substantial tunnels, as well as a run along the isthmus between the Zürich See and the Ober See on the section of the route from Rapperswil to Pfäffikon. Once again, splendid countryside - especially the bit where the sun came out. At Arth-Goldau, there was another tight connection into a train going south to Göschenen. That was the final tight connection of the day. Time to relax a bit and enjoy the ride. And once again, what a ride it was: as the train approached Göschenen, the tracks began to go to and fro along the valley sides, and then into spirals inside the mountain to gain height. That is one memory I'll definitely keep - how the Swiss railways have adapted so well to the landscape they operate in.


Left: At Göschenen, a little shunter was parked by the main line. Right: Meanwhile, Class Deh4/4^II locomotive 95 Andermatt was waiting to propel this FO train up the rack incline to the town whose name it carries.

Leaving the train at Göschenen, I watched as it disappeared into the St. Gotthard tunnel. There were light flurries of snow in the air as I made my way to the FO platform, and boarded my train. This journey would repeat the journey I had made with my fellow Railway Society members five days earlier. On that occasion, it marked the end of the first complete day in Switzerland, so in some ways it was appropriate that it now marked the end of the last complete day there. Even though it was a repeat journey, the landscape had been changed by its covering of snow and the difference in the weather on this occasion. I'm sure it is a trip I could repeat many times, and every one would be a different experience.

To close, this is the view I had from my hotel room balcony:
looking out over the FO/BVZ station and yard at Brig.
Could the base for any railway holiday have been more suitable? I think not.

Thanks to all of the following who have provided helpful information for this page:
"gf", Chris Northeast, Keith Balderson, Manfred Luckman.
I really do appreciate the feedback.

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The signal box at Spiez is built to an unusual design. Even more unusual, perhaps, is the fact that near it, there are some brushes mounted on a pole near the side of the track (smaller picture).


At Luzern, I took a trip from the station to the Verkehrshaus der Schweiz on a number 2 articulated trolleybus (above left). Standing outside the museum was articulated locomotive no. 11852 - which dates from 1940, and has a 1-A-A-1-A-A-1+1-A-A-1-A-A-1 wheel arrangement - it's over 100 feet long! Inside, there are many other exhibits, such as locomotive 13254 - below left (built as no. 14254 in 1921 and reclassified and renumbered 25 years later) and funicular railmotor number 9, whose coach is built to a stepped design because of the gradient of the track.


Left: typical scenery between Zweisimmen and Montreux. Right: a railway wagon in an unusual advertising livery.

Roaming Around Switzerland - May 1997