Tour of Switzerland on trains: GoldenPass Line Lucerne-Interlaken-Montreux

Train is the best vehicle for touring Switzerland. For the first time visit, I chose the GoldenPass train-line from Lucerne-Interlaken-Montreux. This route not only presented us breathtaking sceneries of lakes surrounding by Alps mountains, but also gave us chances to visit several lovely Swiss cities. 

After visiting PSI lab, we took 2 days off so that we have 4 days to explore Switzerland including the weekend. It was the first time that I visited Switzerland, and Tim had only been to Zurich before, so I planned a train tour around a large region of the country to get an overall impression.

Taking trains is the best way to tour Switzerland. Swiss people design several train routes with wonderful scenery for tourists, such as GoldenPass, Bernina Express, Glacier Express etc (http://www.swisstravelsystem.com/en/highlights-en/grand-train-tour-of-switzerland.html). This time we chose the GoldenPass line from Lucerne-Interlaken-Montreux, because this route goes along many mountains and lakes. This route starts from a lovely city Lucern, and has easy connections towards Zürich, Bern and Lausanne. 

The public transportation is very convenient in Switzerland, not only that they have many connections by trains, trams, buses and even boats, but also that they have a special Swisspass for tourists (http://www.swisstravelsystem.com/en/gttos_list-1/swiss-travel-pass.html). With the 4-days Swisspass, we not only have access to more than 480 museums, but also can unlimitedly take all the public transports. This function is very convenient, especially that we can easily adjust our schedules during the journey.

We designed our schedule in this way: in the morning we took train tours for enjoying nature view, and in the afternoon we got out from the train and visited a city nearby.

GoldenPass route from Lucerne to Interlaken

Lucerne is my favorite city from this tour. Actually I love all the four cities we have visited: Zürich, Lucern, Bern and Lausanne. They have similar features: good size (not large not tiny), quiet but not silent, cozy and pleasant. Lucern is very representative at these features. I will talk about these cities individually in the following blogs.

The train route between Lucerne to Interlaken went by many lakes, which gave wonderful lake+mountain view. There are many trains on this part of GoldenPass route, it is not necessary to take the special GoldenPass trains which only have limited schedules.

Sitting at the trains with big windows on the sides and even along the edges of the ceilings, the panorama view is really enjoyable. 

A nature view documentary movie with windows as screen.

The view of Lake Brienz near Interlaken. Blue sky, white clouds, reflection of mountains on the clear water.

Bus tour around Thunersee near Interlaken

Interlaken means "between lakes" literally, which is a city connecting Lake Brienz  and Lake Thun. We stayed at the north of Lake Thun for one night, to where we needed to transfer by buses. The view on buses around Lake Thun is also very pretty.

There are many ski resorts in Interlaken. Besides, from Interlaken one can take trains with several changes to one of the main summits of the Bernese Alps: the 4,158 meter tall Jungfrau. The end of the railway is at Jungfraubahn station, which reaches 3,454 meter, as the highest train station in Europe.

We really want to explore Jungfrau, but we only had one day to stay near Interlaken. Considering the chance to see the view in Jungfrau largely depends on the weather, we decided not to bet. Instead, we took ~1 hour train from Interlaken to the Capital city: Bern. Bern is very lovely, Tim put it in his rank 1 on Swiss cities.

GoldenPass route from Interlaken to Montreux

There are high density of tall mountains from Interlaken to Montreux, so the trains have to drive very slowly here. Therefore there are not many trains running though this route. From Zweisimmen to Montreux, we took the special GoldenPass Classic tourist train. 

The inside looking of GoldenPass Classic keeps the last century style. There are other choices on this route such as GoldenPass Panoramic, Chocolate Train etc. See their homepage for more details: http://www.goldenpass.ch/en

When I was planning this trip, I thought the part from Zweisimmen to Montreux will be much less impressive comparing with other parts in the GoldenPass route, because there are no lakes. Indeed the lakes add a lot of points for the mountain view, however, the views from Zweisimmen to Montreux were surprisingly astonishing. Maybe because there are not many open areas for lakes, the tall mountains were very close with us. When the trains went along very narrow valleys, the steep cliffs with many interesting shapes surrounding us were so impressive that I did not have time to blink. 

We passed a village with many balloons, it seemed like they were having a balloon festival.

Train tour from Montreux to Lausanne

Once we reached Montreux, we saw a lake again: the Lake Geneva. As I am interested on city Lausanne, we took a train towards it. On this train route, mountains across the large Lake Geneva are far away, and the local altitudes are getting flatter and flatter. After big mountains become small slopes, many villages around Lake Geneva can be seen. 

Train tour from Lausanne to Zürich

Because our flight back to Vienna departed from Zürich, we took fast trains from Lausanne all the way to Zürich in the last day. The views were much less fascinating on this route: not many mountains, no lakes, but many flat fields.

3 different Hotel views of mountain+lake

I love the rooms with mountain plus lake view, so I spent a lot of effort to look for hotels with pretty view at different lakes on this trip. We have stayed at 3 different hotels at the starting, the middle, and the ending points of the GoldenPass train tour. I am satisfied with all the 3 hotels which have wonderful views but with different flavors. 

The Hotel Seeburg near Lucerne has the most brilliant room design among these 3: as soon as we walked into the room, we saw the wonderful lake+mountain view in front of us. Between the room and the balcony there is nothing but a glass door and a large glass window. It is relaxing to have a drink sitting in the balcony with such wonderful view. Besides, around the glass window there are narrow mirrors at the corners of the room, which make the room look very deep. I love their room design very much. 

Near Interlaken I did not choose a big hotel but a bed & breakfast family hotel (B&B Schönörtli) which locates in the north of Lake Thun. Honestly we had trouble to get into the hotel as the hotel was on a hill which is not very easy to access when we do not have a car, especially when the bus going up hill stops running very early (I mis-planed this). So we had to walk up a hill with our suitcases.

But the views pay back. Things have two sides. Just because this village on hill is not that easy to access by public transports, it is not busy at all. There are only a few lights in this little village at night, so that we got to see beautiful stars, and the moonlight shined on the mountains across the Lake Thun. Lake Thun has a narrow shape, so the mountains look very close with us even across a lake.

As the B&B is a family house, its windows are old and much smaller than what we had at Lucerne. We could not lie on the bed and enjoy the view in the same time, so we have spent a lot of time standing in front of the windows, looking at the stars, the moon, and the pink clouds when sun raised the second morning. 

At the end of our GoldenPass train tour, we stayed at Hôtel avec vue Le Rivage in Lutry Village ner Lausanne. The hotel design is so so, I did not like that the window is not fully facing the Lake Geneva. But I do love this little village Lutry. It is 5-10 mins by train to Lausanne, very convenient in transportation. And it is very pretty and quiet. There is a long greenway for walking around Lake Geneva, right in front of the hotel we stayed. We had a very pleasant walk in the morning before leaving.

Switzerland vs. Austria : My first impression

Switzerland and Austria have many common things: they are both German-speaking countries (although Swiss German is very different with Austria German and German German); they both have a large proportion of lands inside Alps region; they are both crazy at ski, etc. Since I live in Austria at the moment, I would naturally compare this two countries, and try to find out their differences. 

Here are what I feel:

1. Switzerland is much better in tourist business. They have the SwissPass in different time scales for tourists, making public transportation very convenient. Swiss people design many nice train routes for scenery such as the GoldenPass route I took, while Austrian people have not developed routes specially for tourist purpose, even if Austria has the equivalent wonderful views in Alps. 

Also it is very convenient to search routes using just Google maps in Switzerland. Google can find out the all the public trains, the trams and the bus schedules, the exceptions are the schedules from private train companies. I am not sure about the boat schedules as there were not much boats running when we went to Switzerland in winter. However, Google maps in Austria only gave partial train schedules, plus some bus schedules outside of Vienna. For the complete train schedules we have to use OBB websites or apps. For the trams & buses schedules in Vienna, Google does not help at all. In Vienna we use an app called "qando Wien" to search routes. In other cities, I always grabbed a paper map in tourist center or grabbed tram+bus schedules on tram and bus. I do not understand why Google does not have full transportation information from Austrian.

2. Switzerland has many medium size cities which have similar sizes. But in Austria the situation is several stars surround the moon: one big city (Vienna) plus several medium size cities. 

City sizes in Switzerland (till 31 December 2014, from Wikipedia): 1 Zurich with 391,359 inhabitants; 2 Geneva 194,565, 3 Basel 174,491; 4 Lausanne 133,897; 5 Bern 130,015; 6 Winterthur 106,778; 7 Luzern 81,057....

City sizes in Austria (till 1 January 2014, from Wikipedia): 1 Vienna with 1,812,605 inhabitants; 2 Graz 269,997; 3 Linz 193,814; 4 Salzburg 146,631; 5 Innsbruck 124,579; 6 Klagenfurt 96,640; 7 Villach 60,004....

3. This is my personal impression from not too many samples I have seen: The cabins in Swiss Alps look plain and boring without much decoration, especially compared with the cabins in Austria Alps. Some of the cabins in Austria Alps have been colored by light lovely colors. Even for those wooden ones with original wood colors, they usually have pretty paintings on the walls, and pretty decorations in balconies. A similar difference was found on churches: several churches I visited in Switzerland also look much more boring than those in Austria, because almost half of the Swiss churches are Protestant churches which intentionally refuse decorations and even statues. In Switzerland there are 38.0% Roman Catholic, and 26.1% Protestantism. But in Austria there are 59.9% Roman Catholicism, 6% Eastern Orthodoxy, 6% Islam, and only 4% Protestantism. I suspect this religion culture also affect Swiss people's attitude on house decoration, at least from outside they do look plain. My another feeling is that in the southern French-speaking area in Switzerland, the houses look more interesting than the northern German-speaking area.

In general, Switzerland and Austria do give me more similar feeling comparing with other countries. Not only that they both have wonderful mountain scenery, but that they have a similar flavor: instead of being shining or grandiose, they are more cozy and peaceful, very much livable.