To get a reflection-free image on the Glacier Express, you have to jam your lens right up against the glass. (Photo by David Lassen)
We meet another Glacier Express at Oberalppass, the highest spot on the trip. (Photo by David Lassen)
It’s called the slowest express train in the world for a reason.
Switzerland's Glacier Express takes an extremely modest 8 hours, 13 minutes to cover the 180 miles from St. Moritz to Zermatt, meaning it races along at an average speed of a little over 20 mph.
But then, no one’s taking this train as basic transportation. This is truly a case where the trip is more about the journey than the destination, and it’s a journey 200,000 people take each year.
In addition to the spectacular segment between Chur and St. Moritz I’d covered on Saturday — a route which (as the Glacier Express folks are happy to point out, repeatedly) is one of just three rail routes on the UNESCO World Heritage list — this trip includes passage through the Vorderrhein Gorge, known as Switzerland’s Grand Canyon; over Overalp Pass, 6,670 feet; and through the 9.5-mile Furka Base Tunnel, which made year-round operations on the route possible when it opened in 1982.
From the Furka tunnel, the line drops back down to Brig (elevation 2,198 feet) and then climbs to Zermatt (5,262 feet) — though I skipped that part of the journey. We’ll get to that later.
The Glacier Express is a premium train — even if you’re on a Swiss Travel Pass, like I am, it requires a reservation (with a 33-franc fee). But it has premium accommodations, too; full meal service; an at-your-seat sound system with informative narration; and most importantly, huge main windows, with panoramic windows along the roof line. You’ll definitely appreciate those for taking in the huge vistas along the route.
But not quite as much for taking photos of those vistas. Unlike the regular Rhatische Bahn trains which cover the first part of the route, these are fixed windows. And while they are absolutely spotless, there’s still a huge problem with reflections (as you’ll see in some of the accompanying photos). I’m glad I’d done the Chur-St. Moritz segment on one of the regular trains the day before.
That’s about the only flaw, though. It truly is a spectacular journey.
Riding the Glacier Express, as with being in Switzerland in general, I am reminded that we in the U.S. have it pretty easy when it comes to language. After watching Andrea, our very cheerful conductor on the first part of today’s trip, switch effortlessly between three languages to talk to the people around me, I asked her how many she can speak. “English, French, German, Swiss German and Italian,” she said. “And a few words of Japanese. Just a few words, though. That language is hard.”
This is not at all unusual. Switzerland has four official languages: French (spoken here in the west of the country); Italian, spoken in a small area along the Italian border; German, the predominant language, and Romanish, a Latin offshoot spoken in the Upper Engadine, the area including St. Moritz.
I left the Glacier Express at Brig to catch a train to Montreux, where I’m spending tonight before trying another one of Switzerland’s great train trips tomorrow. A small irony here: The connection in Brig, at 18 minutes, was the longest in the itinerary constructed by Switzerland Tourism. Naturally, it’s the one I missed. A combination of one bad meet and some extensive track work (the two are likely related) between Flesch and Brig meant we arrived 23 minutes late. Fortunately, this is a country with an enlightened view of train travel, so there was another Montreux train leaving just half an hour after the one I’d missed. The missed connection was nothing more than a minor inconvenience.
Still, the day is rapidly slipping away. So I’ll have to tell you a little about Montreux next time.
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