Slow Train to Switzerland

by Diccon Bewes

  Miss Jemima’s destination that day, so therefore ours, soon appears in front of the boat, a small wooded hillock of land sticking out from the southern shore of the lake. From this angle, there’s a gap halfway up the expanse of leafy green covering the whole shoreline, a hole filled by possibly the best example of collective conservation in Switzerland: the Grand Hotel Giessbach. In 1978 this historic hotel closed and was going to be replaced with a “jumbo chalet”, a plan that prompted environmental campaigner Franz Weber to leap into action. He created the “Giessbach for the Swiss People” Foundation, which bought the hotel estate for three million francs after a national fundraising campaign.

  It has been painstakingly renovated, with period furniture and authentic décor, making it one of the few hotels where we can experience hotel life from the Belle Époque era, although with en suite bathrooms and television. Even if Miss Jemima hadn’t stayed there I would have been tempted to stop for tea on the terrace, but her itinerary means staying the night. It’s the most expensive night of this whole journey and one I had to book months in advance to be sure of a room, but it’s a unique opportunity to live like a Victorian tourist for a few hours. Our boat sidles up to the hotel’s boat house and we step off onto the dock, and back in time.

  A little red carriage with five compartments and green curtains sits waiting to carry us up to the hotel, 105m above us. This is Europe’s oldest public funicular, opened on 21 July 1879 and still using the original carriages, which explains the hard wooden seats and open sides. Each compartment is slightly higher than the previous one, meaning that the whole carriage slants at a permanent angle, although the seats are level. The driver ensures that all the small doors are shut and latched, then we’re off at the stately speed of 1.5m per second; in other words, about five minutes later we reach the hotel. It’s the kind of luxury nineteenth-century grand hotels could afford, and indeed needed to build if they were to attract guests. Miss Jemima had to walk up from the lakeside, but that was in 1863, before Giessbach was a hotel for the rich and the royal.

  Giessbach’s funicular still runs today but its first grand hotel burnt down in 1883

  Twelve years after her visit, it became the latest spot in Switzerland to sport a grand hotel, designed by the same architect as the Victoria-Jungfrau in Interlaken, Horace Edouard Davinet. His five-storey palatial creation, topped by domes and known locally as “the Louvre”, survived only eight years; its upper floors were destroyed by fire in October 1883. The phoenix that emerged from the ashes was more angular, with pointed gables and witch’s hat towers, more Swiss chalet than French château. From the outset it had the latest gadgets, such as electric lighting and water closets, plus a darkroom for photographers and three concerts a day. This is the building that was nearly torn down in the 1970s, and it’s our home for the night. It may not look as refined as its predecessor, but its creamy white walls and blood-red shutters make a memorable impression against the backdrop of woods and water. The interior looks like the set for a period drama, complete with parquet floors and dangly chandeliers, and plaster cherubs popping up all over the place.

  I feel a tad underdressed in my shorts and T-shirt, and am beginning to wonder if there’s a Lunn-style dress code for dinner. Luckily, smart casual is smart enough for Giessbach and most places these days, except the Palace Hotel in Gstaad where gentlemen still have to wear jackets. Someone should tell them it’s no longer 1913.

  Up the hill behind the current hotel is the old one, almost as large but built in the 1850s in a simpler chalet style. It looks like the prototype for so many faux-rustic Hilton Garden Inns, except that it’s the real deal. Today it serves as the staff quarters, but back in 1863 it was “said to afford the best quarters in the Bernese Oberland”, according to Murray. However, there was no room for the Junior United Alpine Club:

  “Our application for beds at the large and fashionable hotel was ineffectual, the hundred and fifty it contained being all engaged. But an offer was made that our party might occupy a chalet that stood on the grounds, without fear of intrusion from other travellers. This arrangement fell in so charmingly with our ideas of novelty and romance that we immediately appropriated rooms, through whose lattices twined the pendants of the vine and over whose carved balcony clung the tendrils of the Virginian Creeper.”

  The real reason people came to Giessbach wasn’t the lake views, as beautiful as they are, but the waterfalls, a chain of cascades that tumble down the adjacent hillside, creating an idyllic woods-and-water setting. Miss Jemima liked them:

  “Although inferior in height to some others, it surpasses them in beauty, and in the adjunct of a rich forest of firs through which it breaks its way. The Giessbach is one of the prettiest of falls, about 500 feet in height. There is nothing wild about it; indeed, with its immediate surroundings of green turfy knolls and dark woods, it had the effects of a park scene.”

  And she was right. These falls are not as dramatic or tumultuous as others in Switzerland, but they are infinitely more accessible. A stepped path climbs up alongside, leading to a gallery behind the curtain of water, then back down through the woods and under the tall stone pylons of the funicular. It’s easy to see how enchanted visitors would have been (and still are, I confess) – especially once you consider the nocturnal extravaganza that used to be laid on every night, much to the audience’s delight:

  “At ten the bell rang to summon the company to the region of the hall. At a signal of a sky-rocket, each of the six leaps, from being shaded in the dusk were instantaneously illuminated by coloured lights. The lower fall poured rubies, the one above emeralds, above that amethysts, then the topaz mounted to the next storey, and lastly crystals showered their gems in succession. The colours were then reversed as they lighted the beautiful scene. … The effect was magical.”

  There are no such kaleidoscopic displays on offer today, although the lower falls are lit with plain yellow lights. Instead, we can enjoy an outstanding dinner, with fish from the lake and meat from Brienz – the hotel tries to be as sustainable as possible, using local farms and suppliers – and possibly the best service I have ever experienced in Switzerland. It’s a joy to stay in a place where the staff smile and actually seem to enjoy their jobs.

  Miss Jemima’s chalet night was very similar to ours in Kandersteg – “It seemed laughably like sleeping in a tea-chest. You had wood as your zenith, wood for your nadir and on north, south, east, and west, wood encompassed us.” There’s no tea chest for us tonight, but a somewhat palatial room looking out across the lake so that we can watch it darken to inky black as the sun goes down. And we get a perfect night’s sleep, safe in the knowledge that our boat will not depart until 10am. Being tied to public transport timetables can often be frustrating; today it’s a luxury, as we have no other way of leaving Giessbach. So we can linger over a sumptuous breakfast buffet, by far the best yet, and enjoy a memorable place. Miss Jemima waxed lyrically about it:

  “It was a positive Swiss Elysium that evening at the Giessbach, and we were quite willing to give ourselves up to the delusion for those few hours that we were really the possessors of chalet, grounds and waterfall.”

  Or as my mother put it, “Expensive, but worth every single penny.”

  For Miss Jemima, today’s journey was one of the longest and most convoluted of the whole trip. Here’s what lay ahead: boat to Brienz, diligence over the Brünig Pass to Alpnach, boat to Lucerne, boat to Weggis, and finally a four-hour hike to the top of Rigi. They got up at 5am and arrived at 10pm, although that did include four hours’ sightseeing in Lucerne that they somehow contrived to squeeze in around lunch. No wonder she talks of a “sense of fatigue” by the time they reach the summit in the dark.

  The first part of our journey couldn’t be easier. We ride down in the funicular, take a paddle steamer for the ten-minute glide across to Brienz and arrive in time for the train at the adjoining station. The fact that the whole Swiss transport system functions as one integrated network never ceas
es to amaze me. Timetables and tickets for trains, boats, buses and cable cars all run seamlessly together, no matter how many different companies are involved. And it actually works, so that the system generally operates like clockwork.

  Look at the map and there’s an obvious route for a road to link Canton Bern with central Switzerland: the Brünig pass, which at 1008m high was a challenge, but not an insurmountable one. Harder to overcome were the political and financial hurdles. Bern’s neighbouring canton Obwalden had neither the will nor the way to contemplate any construction. In the end the Swiss government provided the funds, on strategic grounds, and the increasing demands from tourist traffic supplied the motivation.

  The new road was only two years old when the Junior United Alpine Club travelled over it in a coach and horses, and Miss Jemima was suitably impressed:

  “This road, like the one over the Dala, has won for the Swiss the character of being the best roadmakers in Europe. It is wide and supported by granite buttresses, and in one part is overhung by a shelf of rock which projected entirely across the road.”

  Murray was more taken with the views, and not just the more prominent one of the Haslital and Bernese Alps to the south. He looked north as well: “a charming and first-rate view is obtained along the entire valley of Nidwalden, backed by Pilatus, with the Lungern See for a foreground, forming altogether one of the most delicious scenes in Switzerland”. Of course he meant Obwalden when he wrote Nidwalden, but it’s easy to get the two muddled up (the former means “above the woods”, the latter “below the woods”); Ob- and Nid- were once known together as Unterwalden, one of the three founding cantons of Switzerland.

  Miss Jemima went by carriage; we can experience the same views over the Brünig in one of Switzerland’s prettiest train rides. The Golden Pass line, linking Lucerne with Interlaken (and then on through Gstaad to Montreux), may not have the wow factor of some other mountain train trips, but its gentle beauty makes it hard not to like. And it’s so very Swiss, with cows in the fields, boats on the lakes, snow on the mountains and big windows on the trains.

  The Brünig Line opened on 14 June 1888 and was conceived as a way of linking Bern with the Gotthard line to Italy (this was long before the Lötschberg Tunnel), although it’s yet another route that was built principally for, and sustained by, tourism. That’s partly because the narrow-gauge line (the only one to be run by the national rail company, SBB) wasn’t that suitable for cargo, and partly because it was a part-time line. It was a summer-only service for the first 15 years, and the final stretch to Interlaken wasn’t completed until 1916; before that passengers had to change to a boat in Brienz. Although it serves the towns and villages along the way, it’s still an important tourist route, with the Golden Pass line marketed as one of the four principal panoramic train rides in Switzerland. If only you could travel along the whole line in one trip, without having to change trains, I’d like it even more.

  It was a tight squeeze for the original Brünig train line

  Before we climb up and over the pass, the train takes a half-hour detour along the flat U of the Aare valley to the town of Meiringen. This is not strictly necessary geographically speaking, but politically and economically it was essential to the line being built. The more direct route would have left Meiringen stranded and unable to entice tourists off the rails and onto old-fashioned wheels. Today trains still pull into Meiringen before returning back along a short stretch of the same track and heading upwards.

  Other than its unusual train arrangements, Meiringen has two claims to fame. It is said to be the birthplace of the meringue, hence the name of that dessert, although this is much disputed. Any proof that an Italian chef named Gasparini had his sweet moment of inspiration here was lost in two disastrous town fires in the late nineteenth century. Easier to verify is the connection with Sherlock Holmes. The town’s old English church is a Holmes museum, including a very authentic recreation of the parlour at 221b Baker Street, and outside stands a bronze statue of the man himself, in a suitably thoughtful pipe-in-mouth pose. And this is all because he died at the nearby Reichenbach Falls.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle visited Meiringen in 1893 and decided to use the imposing falls as the site for the struggle to the death between Holmes and Moriarty. The spot where they plunged from the ledge into the foaming water is marked by a star, even though Holmes didn’t actually die. The public outcry, and lure of money, led Conan Doyle to resurrect his most famous character ten years later. As for the great “death” scene, it perhaps wasn’t even his idea. Peter Lunn, son of Arnold, once told the story of that summer in 1893, when Conan Doyle was staying with his grandfather, Sir Henry. The conversation turned to the problem of Sherlock. “My grandfather said ‘Push him over the Reichenbach Falls’, and Conan Doyle hadn’t heard of them so he showed them to him,” Lunn reported. Meiringen has been silently thanking him ever since.

  The Reichenbach Falls are much bigger and louder than those at Giessbach, and here too a little red funicular with open sides and wooden seats (this one dating from 1899) hauls visitors from the valley floor up to the top. Perhaps it was built to cope with the rush of visitors to the falls after Holmes brought them worldwide fame, so what better way to enjoy the short journey than with Conan Doyle, in The Final Problem (1893):

  It is, indeed, a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself is an immense chasm, lined by glistening coal-black rock, and narrowing into a creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip.

  Come on 4 May (the date of that fictional fatal struggle in 1891) and there will undoubtedly be a few hardy souls in Victorian costumes around to mark the anniversary – not just someone in a deerstalker, but also a Watson, a Mrs Hudson and a Moriarty too.

  From the Brünig Pass it’s downhill all the way to Lake Lucerne, along a route that passes a chain of smaller lakes. The first, Lake Lungern, used to be considerably larger, but a creative solution to the lack of usable farmland and waves of rural emigration resulted in the water level dropping 18m. After almost 50 years’ construction, and much discussion (which divided the village of Lungern into the Wets and the Dries), a 420m tunnel opened in 1836, carrying gallons of water downhill and exposing acres of new land. There were some unforeseen after-effects, such as landslides, but the village gained useful land to farm in an otherwise fairly inhospitable area. Switzerland may have been an adventure playground for tourists, but it wasn’t much fun for the locals in spots like this.

  Murray complains that the lake is no longer so beautiful, but it looks picturesque enough to me, framed by quintessentially Swiss soft green fields and deep green hills. And there are plenty of large lakes dotted all over Switzerland to keep the Wets satisfied.

  The train trundles on down through the gently undulating countryside and tidy little towns with their Catholic churches topped by golden crosses. Miss Jemima wrote of this landscape “its character is peaceful and pleasing, but not grand” and she wasn’t wrong, although she had the advantage seeing it in sun, which “shone with its usual Swiss force”. The Swiss sun was clearly rather strong for their sensitive British constitutions, as Mr William noted, “It is so hot in the middle of the day that it is foolish to do anything but rest.” In contrast, after a promising start our weather is going downhill faster than we are, so by the time we reach Sarnen, the capital of Obwalden, there is more grey sky than blue. Obwalden, one of the smallest cantons in terms of both area and population, is literally at the heart of Switzerland: just south of Lake Sarnen is the geographical centre of the country, a spot called Älggialp that hosts an annual ceremony to honour the Swiss Personality of the Year. And some people think the British have strange customs.

  At the stroke of midday, the Swiss family sitting across the aisle from us get out their lunch and start munching away. You can bet that
thousands of people are doing exactly the same in homes and restaurants all across Switzerland. Whether it’s a sit-down meal or sandwiches on a train, most Swiss like to eat at noon no matter where they are. Schools close, building sites fall silent and offices empty in time for everyone to eat their lunch, or midday meal as it’s called in German: Mittagessen, or in the Swiss German dialect Zmittag. We remain resolutely British and don’t join in. Not because we had a giant breakfast, but simply because all I have in my bag are some Ricola herbal drops. Lunch will have to wait until Lucerne.

  Miss Jemima had to switch to the boat at Alpnach and was “glad to change our mode of travelling from land to water, from the smothering diligence to the lake steamer”. We can stay on the train thanks to the Lopper Tunnel, which when completed in 1889 finally linked Lucerne with Brienz. A far more impressive feat that year was the opening of the train line up Mt Pilatus, which towers over our heads. This is the world’s steepest rack railway, with a maximum gradient of 48 per cent, an achievement made possible by a revolutionary horizontal cogwheel system. That was the brainchild of Colonel Eduard Locher of Zurich, who also created a company to raise the capital needed for the line. No government money was involved. Why build a 4.6km railway up a barren rocky mountain? So that tourists could stand on the 2132m summit and admire the splendid panorama of the Alps without having to walk or ride up. They have been doing so ever since, to the tune of 350,000 passengers a year these days. The Pilatus railway might have seemed like a crazy idea, but it has been paying dividends ever since it opened for business on 4 June 1889.

  If we are to follow Miss Jemima, we have now four hours to see the sights before our boat across Lake Lucerne. Our first stop is the bank of blue lockers beside the platform. Swiss stations nearly all have luggage lockers, which is nothing short of miraculous to me. I grew up in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s, when lockers were seen as potential bomb depositories for the IRA, so I cherish being able to store my bags for the day without being thought of as a terrorist.