01 4 / 2012
Interlaken - Luzern - Andermatt
The route eastward from Interlaken is almost ridiculously pretty. Especially the part following the shore of Brienzersee, with the azure color of the lake and peaks of the Alps rising high right on the other side of the lake and picturesque small villages on the lakeside. All of that is almost unreal in all of it’s prettiness. It’s almost if someone created the scenery from their imagination and went over the top with the prettiness to a degree where it becomes unrealistic. But there it was, right outside the train window for me to enjoy while eating a take-away döner kebab and downing a beer. (I wasn’t able to get a single decent photo from that part of the journey, so you’ll just have to use your imagination picturing the scene…)
After the lake the tracks follow a flatland valley right to the end until Meiringen, and then make an U-turn and start a steep incline towards Brünig-Hasliberg. This part is also gorgeous, offering stunning vistas to the valley previously traveled, together with harrowing narrow & deep gorges right below the train tracks. I was surprised by the degree of the incline the train did, considering that it least seemed like a perfectly normal train meant for much flatter geography. I’m not sure if there was some sort of cogwheel mechanism in use, but at least on Interlaken station the very same train was on standard tracks.
The overwhelming beauty of the landscape shifted into more normal rural & suburban landscape when the train closed in on Luzern, a rather large city. At some point the views finally got uninteresting enough so that I had a chance of sifting through the huge amount of photos already captured during the short time in Switzerland.
Nearing Andermatt, the landscape gets more mountainous and interesting again. Close to Göschenen there’s an especially spectacular stretch of spaghetti rails with a gem of a small Swiss village in a deep valley. The standard track, which is covered with the Interrail ticket, only goes as far as Göschenen. I had to change trains there and pay for a ticket for the final part of the journey, 10mins & 6€ or so from Göschenen to Andermatt.
