There’s a romance to train travel that no other form of transportation offers. Pick the right route and instead of just being about getting from A to B, your journey becomes an intrinsic, enjoyable part of the greater travel experience – sitting back, relishing the views, sipping a drink, letting someone else deal with the practicalities.
And nowhere does spectacular rail routes better than Switzerland, a small country with a big, efficient transportation system to be envied and scenery to enchant. Here’s our selection of the best train trips you can do there and some of the highlights along the way, concentrated in the country’s south where the scenery is arguably at its most stunning.
1. The Bernina Express
2. The Glacier Express
3. The Gornergrat Railway
4. The Schilthorn
We’re widening our definition of “railway” here because the awesome series of cable cars that whisk visitors up the Schilthorn mountain really deserves to be on this list. The trip to, and views from, the peak have a “license to thrill”, and we make no apologies for the terrible pun because this area is so beautiful that it caught the eye of the James Bond team who made On Her Majesty’s Secret Service here in 1968 – and if it’s good enough for 007, it’s good enough for us.
5. The Jungfrau Railway
