Slow Train to Switzerland

by Diccon Bewes

  Ruth Reinecke-Dahinden told me that the demolition of the old hotel was very painful for her and her family to witness, a sad moment in Rigi’s history. As tempted as I am to ask Frau Käppeli what she thinks, I demur and instead ask if there happen to be any records from the nineteenth century; I have yet to see any proof that Miss Jemima was in Switzerland. The hotels she stayed in have suffered a string of calamities since she was there: Geneva – now a watch shop, Chamonix – now a casino, Sion – vanished, Leukerbad – demolished, Kandersteg – burned down, Interlaken – bankrupt, Grindelwald – burned down, Giessbach – demoted, Rigi – demolished. This is my last chance to find her in a visitors’ book – and there’s a glimmer of hope from this penultimate stop on the tour.

  “We have guest books dating back to 1816,” says Frau Käppeli with a smile.

  My heart jumps. I almost get carried away with the prospect of seeing Miss Jemima’s name in a guest book from a hotel that no longer exists; then the other shoe drops.

  “But we keep them down in our archives in Schwyz.”

  So near and yet so far.

  My mother’s sigh is as defeated as my face, which always betrays any disappointment (I’d be a useless poker player). Our hostess tries to explain.

  “Die Bücher sind heilig,” she says, switching to German. This literally means “The books are holy”, but fear not, dear English reader, I won’t force you to test your German any further. Suffice to say, Frau Käppeli promises to go down to Schwyz soon and see who signed the book on 9 July 1863. Patience is a virtue, apparently, but right now I’m not feeling that virtuous.

  It’s early to bed for us. The rain is still driving down, meaning that our planned star gazing away from the city lights is off the agenda. We also have to get up at an unhealthy hour to watch something that happens every day, although our sunrise on Rigi is in serious danger of being a washout.

  Saturday, 5am. Complete silence. And that means only one thing: fortunately, there will be no rain on our parade today.

  Miss Jemima described her rude awakening after barely five hours’ sleep:

  “At three o’clock the winding notes of the arousing horn were heard, its blasts approaching nearer and nearer as each corridor was in its turn blown up. Truly this was an effectual awakener, as blow upon blow, blast after blast, was twisted out of that bark-bound hookah.”

  Instead of an alphorn I have my mother. We can get up slightly later than Miss Jemima, thanks to the advent of summer time, which Switzerland introduced after the rest of Europe. Back in 1977, the Swiss government brought in a new summer time law, proposing that Switzerland follow other European countries, particularly neighbouring France and Italy, by having daylight saving between March and October. The farmers weren’t happy (or at least their cows weren’t) and they forced a referendum on the issue. The cows won: in May 1978 the Swiss voted against summer time. The government leaflet advocating a Yes vote was great, not least because one argument was that television and radio times wouldn’t be in sync – you’d come home from work to find that you’d missed your favourite show. Much of German-speaking Switzerland watches German television and all the programme times would be wrong.

  Nevertheless, in Switzerland there’s one thing more important than cows, and that’s trains – and train timetables. Once Germany and Austria had both introduced summer time in 1980, Switzerland became a little time warp in the centre of Europe for six months of the year. Some might argue that the Swiss are always one step behind the rest of Europe, but being one hour behind all its neighbours proved to be a logistical headache for the train timetablers. So the government brought back the summer time law, and on this occasion the cows lost.

  Sunrise on Rigi was the highlight of many Victorian trips to Switzerland

  And thank goodness for that, as it means we can lie in until 5am. Clear skies might mean a visible sunrise, but also very fresh air. We both don almost every piece of clothing we have with us and head outside into the dark, silent night – alone. It was rather a different story 150 years ago, when seeing the first rays of sunlight from Rigi was the highlight of a Swiss tour, so it was busy, very busy, as Miss Jemima wrote:

  “We counted about a hundred and fifty early risers, most of whom wore the miserable expression that would find words in Dr. Watts’ moral song ‘You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again.’”

  We are precisely two people, with a whole mountain to ourselves. Evidently, watching the sunrise from Rigi is no longer a must-do for today’s tourists. Most likely I would never have thought to come up for it if Miss Jemima had not brought me here, though I’m grateful she did. In a world where travel has become so fast and crowded, there’s something rather special about simply watching the sun rise over the mountains. This is one of the few times when Miss Jemima had to share the experience with countless strangers and one of the few times when we have managed to do it alone; a reversal of fortune for which we had to wait the whole trip.

  “The vastness of that mighty panorama was impressively sublime and in hushed silence we gazed on that serrated belt as daylight awoke on its three hundred miles of mountains, valleys, lakes and villages.”

  Miss Jemima’s view of a Rigi sunrise has scarcely changed at all. The lights of Lucerne and Zug are twinkling away far beneath our feet, the only signs of life in an otherwise empty blackness. As the first glimmers of light appear on the eastern horizon, so too do the misty layers of the landscape. Ridge after ridge, each paler than the one below, pop up out of the shrinking darkness and the sheets of water around us fade from black to blue. The streaks of cloud and airplane tracks burst into flame as the sun finally appears, making the snow-covered mountains blush and the wisps of fog disappear. As the crisp daylight inches along the valley floors, the green fields emerge from the night, filling the whole panorama with summer colour. The final flourish of this dawn spectacle is the shadow of Rigi creeping its way over to Pilatus – a huge grey pyramid stretching across the lake and almost touching the craggy summit opposite.

  Thank you, Miss Jemima. Without you I would never have seen such a memorable Swiss sunrise; or been so bloody freezing while enjoying it. Mr William had a similar opinion: “quite the grandest thing we had seen and worth a great deal of trouble … it was bitterly cold.”

  “At our eight o’clock breakfast we were almost alone”, wrote Miss Jemima after sunrise that morning. Fifteen decades later, but at exactly the same time, we are sitting in the empty dining room of almost the same hotel. But after that, whereas the Junior United Alpine Club had no choice but to walk down to the lakeside town of Küssnacht, we can take the first train of the day, following the Schwyz line to Goldau before changing to a regular train there. The blue-and-white carriages roll into view and the driver hops out to unload the milk and other supplies for the hotel. Short of using a helicopter, it’s still the only way to get goods up to the top.

  For the return journey the train acts as delivery and postal service, carrying sacks of postcards and packages – and two passengers – down to the bottom. The Rigi Kulm hotels used to print their own stamps (until that became illegal in 1883) and thousands of cards and letters went from there all around the world. The postcard business boomed: in 1873 only 22,000 cards were sent abroad from Switzerland; 10 years later the figure was 2.6 million and by 1900 it was 15.7 million. The funny thing about postcards in those days is that there was almost no room to write a message; you had to squeeze it into a small blank space, typically under the picture or a triangle across one corner (as the Lion postcard on page 231 shows). That’s because the address and stamp filled the whole of the reverse side.

  The weather gods smiled on us today, but not everyone is so lucky. As the Murray Handbook says, “Fortunate are they for whom the view is not marred by clouds and rain, a very common occurrence, as the leaves in the Album kept in the inn will testify.” The Album means, of course, the guestbook – I can only hope the gods will be as kind when it comes to finding a certain name in said gue
stbook. Fingers crossed.

  We could have taken a train straight through from Goldau to Lucerne, but in an effort to follow Miss Jemima more exactly, we get off in Küssnacht am Rigi and switch to the boat. As pretty as it is, Küssnacht is not exactly on the Lake Lucerne tourist trail, but is known across the rest of Switzerland for two events. After escaping his captors during the storm on the lake, William Tell caught up with the baddy Gessler in a leafy lane near Küssnacht and killed him; the Tell Chapel in the Hohle Gasse reputedly stands on the exact spot of the deed. More artistic is the Klausjagen festival every December, which celebrates St Nicholas with a procession of 200 or so people wearing huge transparent mitres, each lit internally with a candle.

  Other than that, Küssnacht sits in sleepy splendour at the head of the most easterly finger of the lake, with a boat only every two hours. Even on this Saturday in summer, it’s refreshingly quiet: no groups, no hordes, just locals enjoying a coffee in the sun. There’s the usual smattering of handsome old buildings that populates almost every Swiss town; missing out on two world wars ensured that Switzerland did not have to suffer the destruction of its architectural heritage (at least not from bombs and bullets). Apart from the lakefront being dominated by a car park, it’s a perfectly pleasant spot to wait for a boat, in this case a sleek catamaran that whisks us over the water to Lucerne.

  Whereas it took Miss Jemima & Co. most of the day to travel from Lucerne to Neuchâtel, we can manage it in under two hours. After all those mountain trains, the ride from Lucerne seems so gentle and so lush. We skirt round the Emmental region, where the holey cheese comes from that is synonymous with Switzerland, even though there are many other types of Swiss cheese and few of them have holes. By the way, the holes (technically called “eyes”) are really trapped CO2 released by bacteria added during the final stages of production.

  Each round of Emmental weighs up to 120 kilos and each kilo requires 12 litres of milk. That demands an awful lot of cows. No wonder Canton Bern has more cows than any other canton, and most of them seem to be in the fields outside our train window. This is agricultural Switzerland at its most typical, a chocolate-box image: not only cows but farmhouses with geraniums in every window box, barns with roofs the size of tennis courts, a lumpy landscape covered in what appears to be green velvet, and a not-so-distant backdrop of the Alps. It’s a Swiss version of the Cotswolds, only with bigger hills and fewer sheep, and pretty enough to make you want to yodel. That is, until you reach Olten, where prettiness goes out the window.

  To be fair, Olten has an attractive old town tucked away inside the modern outskirts, much like every town in Switzerland. The problem is that all most people see of Olten is the train station and the railway lines, none of which is worth writing home about. As Miss Jemima said, “Olten is a central junction, where lines cross.” It would be rather like sending a postcard home from Crewe.

  This is the focal point of the Swiss train network, the X where the main north–south and east–west lines cross, the 0 from which all distances were once measured (though that has since moved to Basel; Olten is now at the 39.29km mark). In Switzerland, all trains lead to Olten – or at least they did, thanks to Stephenson and Swinburne, those English engineers who mapped out the national network in 1850. Intercity trains from Bern to Zurich no longer stop here, but in the early days everyone did: going from Zurich to Lucerne by train meant changing in Olten and travelling along two sides of a triangle. No wonder the journeys took so long, although having slow trains, cheaply built lines and small engines didn’t help either. For example, the only direct train service from Zurich to Geneva travelled at an average of 30km/h and stopped at 35 stations along the way.

  At least the Swiss trains were comfortable; Mr William wrote that “the second class are superior to our first class”. Only about 5 per cent of carriages were first class and many Swiss couldn’t afford to travel in anything but third, with its hard wooden seats. Tourists generally chose the upholstered comfort of second, as we have done today. It’s not plush, but it’s definitely not wooden and it’s perfectly comfy – and clean. After a change in Olten, of course, we finally reach Neuchâtel, a place that sounds so much more romantic in French than German (Neuenburg) or English (Newcastle). This was the last stop in Switzerland for the first conducted tour of 1863, which means that for us the end is nigh.

  Lakeside Neuchâtel was Miss Jemima’s final stop in Switzerland

  Carved from a slab of butter. That’s how the novelist Alexandre Dumas described Neuchâtel, although cheese might be a more apt description for a Swiss city. Either way, the buildings of the old town are a gorgeous deep golden colour that looks even warmer on a sunny day, with the light reflecting off Lake Neuchâtel. Throw in a distant view of the Alps and the castle on a hill (hence the town’s name, though it is no longer new) and you have a picture of Swiss urban happiness. This was not the motive for this being the final stop on Miss Jemima’s tour, nevertheless; that was down to two practical reasons: taking the shortest route home, along the newly opened train line to Pontarlier in France, and buying a watch. Canton Neuchâtel has been the centre of the Swiss watch industry for centuries, ever since the watchmakers of Geneva moved out of their overcrowded city into the Jura mountains.

  Up to the mid-1600s, Geneva had been the capital of Swiss watchmaking, thanks to Calvin banning jewellery, which forced city craftsmen to turn to a new trade. They formed the world’s first Watchmaker’s Guild and established a reputation for precision and beauty. However, Geneva wasn’t big enough for all of them, so many moved to the hills between Lake Neuchâtel and the French border. Today, the area is known as Watch Valley and the likes of Omega, Tissot, Swatch and Tag Heuer are all made here. Back in the mid-1800s the town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, up behind Neuchâtel, was the sixth largest town in Switzerland, only marginally smaller than Zurich. After a fire in 1794 it had been rebuilt on a grid pattern and designed specifically for the watchmakers’ needs. As Murray says:

  The chief manufacture [of the canton] is that of watches and clocks, of which 130,000 are exported annually: the central seat of it may be said to be the valley of Chaux de Fonds and Locle; but much is done in the town of Neuchâtel.

  Fast forward 150 years, and whereas Zurich has grown by over 2000 per cent, La Chaux-de-Fonds has only trebled in size, although it’s still making watches, and lots of them. Switzerland now exports 30 million watches every year, with a value of 19 billion francs. Its watches are synonymous with quality and accuracy, even if the whole industry did have to be saved by a cheap plastic version in the 1980s. There was no trendy Swatch for Mr William back in 1863, who wrote, “I have bought a watch for £7 and like the bargain very well”. That’s about £525 today, or rather more than the average Swatch, but substantially less than a Rolex.

  As neither my mother nor I need a new watch, we amble happily round the town centre instead. A drink overlooking the lake, a peek into the Collégiale church, a taste of Bleuchâtel, one of the few blue Swiss cheeses around, and generally being rather lazy. It’s our version of Miss Jemima’s relaxed agenda:

  “This morning was to be one of leisure, the first of the kind in our programme, so a breakfast earlier than eight a.m. was not enforced. We spent it loitering through the town.”

  It seems that this is a town for doing little more than walking and watching. Thomas Cook did exactly the same on his way back to England after leaving his group the week before; and he was much encouraged by what he saw:

  Amongst those numerous promenaders of all ages, both sexes, and all seeming grades of society, there was no rudeness, not the least resemblance of immoral or ridiculous behaviour. The reputed simplicity and morality of the Swiss character was well sustained and abundantly confirmed by a two hours’ ramble and close observation on the banks of the Lake of Neuchâtel.

  I’m happy to report that we saw no signs of “immoral or ridiculous behaviour” either, although I fear our standards might be somewhat lower than Mr Cook’s. What he would make
of the prolific graffiti I dread to think.

  At the time of Cook’s visit, Neuchâtel had not long been Swiss. Renowned for reputedly having the best French speakers in Switzerland, Neuchâtel was also once a political anomaly, as it was part of Prussia. For many years it was a canton within the Swiss Confederation but at the same time a principality belonging to the King of Prussia, an odd state of affairs that arose out of the tangled web that was Europe in centuries past. When the Princess of Neuchâtel, Marie of Orleans, died in 1707, the people had to elect a new ruler from among the many claimants to the throne. They chose Frederick I of Prussia, because it was more important for him to be Protestant than to speak French. Napoleon briefly took over and then it was back to being a Prussian principality in 1815, even though Neuchâtel had by then officially become the 21st canton of Switzerland.

  This unusual situation of being Swiss and Prussian lasted until 1848, when a bloodless revolt in Neuchâtel created a new republic. The royalists didn’t give up without a fight, one that almost caused a war between Prussia and Switzerland until an international conference sorted things out. No princes, no Prussians, Neuchâtel has since then been a totally Swiss republic.

  Both of us are feeling somewhat weary after our 5am start – it really is a challenge keeping up with these Victorians. Even Mr William commented in one letter home that he was “surprised that the ladies have all stood it so well. I should not like to have to work so hard for much longer tho’ it is very enjoyable for a short time and we are delighted with our visit.” We have yet to find a hotel in Neuchâtel, as the one where Miss Jemima stayed, the Bellevue, no longer exists. A modern replacement seems less than appealing.

  “How do you fancy sleeping at home tonight?” I ask my mother, meaning my home in Bern, not hers in Hampshire.