Switzerland by train is full of surprises in spring
While aboard one of Switzerland’s most scenic train rides, with 44 of my new best friends, snowflakes start swirling. It feels like we’re all trapped in a slow-moving snow dome.
Unlike the Swiss train system, fairytale moments are resistant to scheduling. Yet nature’s timing couldn’t be better. While aboard the Glacier Express, one of Switzerland’s most scenic train rides, with 44 of my new best friends, snowflakes start swirling. Looking through the train’s panoramic windows at the newly frosted wonderland, it feels like we’re all happily trapped within a slow-moving snow dome.
We’ve slid out of St Moritz bound for Zermatt, another world-famous ski resort. Our ride, billed as the world’s slowest express train, will take just over eight hours to wind along 290km of narrow-gauge track that clings to mountainsides, unfurls through tunnels and, thanks to ingenious engineering, seemingly leaps across vertiginous valleys crunched within the Alps.
Spring in Europe is gifting us with lows of minus 9C and scenery better suited to Christmas cards. Fingers crossed we don’t turn blue while going green on this escorted journey that highlights Switzerland’s national Swisstainable initiative.
If that sounds evangelical or even a tad boring, the itinerary is anything but. My tour has attracted guests from Australia, North America, South Africa and beyond. Some are here to proudly SKI (spend the kids’ inheritance) while also, paradoxically, bemoaning their lack of grandchildren; others are worldly travellers who didn’t want to plan finer details or wrangle baggage. Many couples still hold hands after decades together. One guest is embarking on her first overseas trip; others are using it to ease into a months-long grand tour. At least two have stents and are now intent on living life as magnificently as they can. Another two will celebrate birthdays; two couples will clock up anniversaries. There are doctors and nurses, engineers and educators, parents and adult children, retirees and those counting down their remaining years at work.
Occasionally, in packed places such as Zurich’s main train station, we need to keep an eye out for a tiny Swiss flag hoisted aloft by our unflappable British-raised, Austrian-based tour leader, Sophie Peacock. Incredibly, given the group’s size, there is 100 per cent punctuality when it comes to starting each day’s activities.
For who’d want to miss anything, including those famously on-time trains? After gathering in Zurich, we start our clockwise circuit of the country. We zip to St Moritz in the southeast. From here, many guests take an optional side-trip aboard the Bernina Express. This scenic train travels a line so marvellous it’s earned UNESCO World Heritage status. As I’ve previously enjoyed it, I explore the ski town and savour the Art Nouveau stylings of our lodgings, the four-star Hotel Reine Victoria. Before departing the next day, I nip out to a tiny church tucked into nearby woods and spy chirruping squirrels and the tracks of an alpine hare freshly imprinted in the snow. Stretching the legs is a good idea as the Glacier Express is a long day that includes a change of direction at Chur, lunch served at our tables, eyeballing raptors in flight (hello, red kites) and an eye-squinting whiteout at Andermatt. Can reports of blue skies ahead in Zermatt really be true?
We roll up and out of the station to find Zermatt’s star attraction, the Matterhorn, is standing to attention. Sometimes you can be here for days and not see the 4478m-high peak’s familiar, angular flanks. The weather sticks for our gondola trip up to Klein Matterhorn (Little Matterhorn) the next day. At one point, a ski-patrol member sharing my gondola points out where a deadly avalanche recently unfolded on a far slope.
Off-piste adventure-seekers and adrenalin junkies have long had a fatal attraction to this challenging landscape, making profound grief part of Zermatt’s story. Grasp its history at the Matterhorn Museum, with its compelling subterranean displays. Put aside at least 90 minutes to explore it and learn about the peak’s first ascent in 1865 (make up your own mind about what might have happened as the group made its perilous descent). Afterwards, visit the nearby Mountaineers’ Cemetery. Some tombstones feature sculptural ice picks and ropes, depicting the passion these climbers pursued to the end. One poignant inscription, on the grave of New York City-born teenager Donald Stephen Williams, reads: “I chose to climb.” Their resting place is peaceful.
Car-free Zermatt is serviced by fleets of electric taxis and buses. Sustainability is front and centre at Restaurant Potato, a fine-diner where main ingredients for the degustation menus are drawn from within a 99km radius. When I visit, the menu highlights beetroot (as ice cream, tuile, carpaccio), pork belly and duck breast, fir-tree liqueur as a pre-dessert and sweet potato as dessert. It also serves up lessons in Swiss agriculture; among the surprises is the fact this country grows rice and saffron.
We chug out of the valley cradling Zermatt towards Geneva and a convivial farm lunch (one of Trafalgar’s signature Be My Guest experiences). La Ferme Enchantee (The Enchanted Farm), on the city outskirts, is so close to France you could stroll to the border in 45 minutes. Instead, we each roll a sheet of beeswax into a candle (unsure how Australia’s Border Force would view the souvenir, I later leave it in a church), and stroll to a trio of beehives-with-a-view to hear from beekeeper Alberic Delamotte. After tearing our gaze away from the giant bee tattooed on his neck, we learn about Apidae, an organisation working to protect the tiny pollinators. These Make Travel Matter experiences support local communities.
Our time in Geneva is short. Some of us cruise the lake, transformed into a pot of gold by the Jet d’Eau’s rainbows. Back at the Hotel Warwick – a Swisstainable-accredited property that installed “smart glass” to reduce its carbon footprint while increasing natural light and unobstructed views for guests – my room is so elevated I can spy the 140m-high fountain’s plume over rooftops.
Geneva, we barely got to know you, but more wonders await. At Montreux, at Lac Leman’s eastern end, we board one of Switzerland’s newest scenic trains. The GoldenPass Express, which launched in late 2022, pulls us past sun-dappled terraced vineyards to reach the adventure capital of Interlaken. Italian design studio Pininfarina, known for its work with Ferrari and Maserati as well as those Klein Matterhorn gondolas, incorporated chic elements such as sparkly interior carriage walls. Serious train enthusiasts are focused on something else: namely, the revolutionary adjustable bogies that switch this train between different track gauges during a pause in the journey. Passengers no longer have to change trains to cover the route.
The brevity of Geneva is forgiven when we discover Lucerne’s abundant charms. We’re not the first to fall for the city; like us, Queen Victoria came to see the covered timber Chapel Bridge and the Lion Monument. Mark Twain, after seeing the magnificent dying beast carved into a low cliff, called the sculpture “the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world”.
Our final sun-gilded days are spent exploring the car-free Old Town, riding the (quite frankly astonishing) Stanserhorn historic funicular/open-top cable-car combo, watching swans paddle water so clear you can critique their footwork, and rugging up for a horse-and-carriage ride through Engelberg, where we also meet cows and calves in a barn and try piping hot, freshly scraped raclette. At Lucerne’s Luz Seebistro, a glasshouse-like waterfront cafe with Swisstainable credentials, I devour a traditional Swiss pork and beef sausage served with mustard, chips and chewy bread.
Going green isn’t that hard but farewelling my companions might be. On our final night, filled with folkloric alphorn and yodelling silliness, most scramble to join a conga line. As one of our tour’s most mature travellers bops past her seated husband, she sticks out her tongue and snaps out a high-kick. Her timing, just like a Swiss clock, couldn’t be more impeccable.
In the know
Trafalgar’s eight-day Contrasts of Switzerland tour starts from $6750 a person, twin-share. The itinerary includes plenty of free time, which can be used for independent sight-seeing or filled with optional activities.
More to the story
Billed as the world’s first Swisstainable tour, this journey uses Switzerland’s scenic train system. The Swisstainable initiative, a program Switzerland launched in 2021, helps to guide visitors towards making sustainable choices. More than 2500 tourism businesses, including hotels, restaurants, public transport and destinations, have earned Swisstainable accreditation, which has three levels: committed, engaged and leading.
Katrina Lobley was a guest of Trafalgar and Zermatt Tourism.
If you love to travel, sign up to our free weekly Travel + Luxury newsletter here.
