Primavera Europae

Trieste - Venezia Mestre - Bologna

Finally got a true taste of first class travel! My Interrail ticket is for 1st class, but I’ve often travelled on regional trains where there hasn’t been that much difference between 2nd and 1st class (if there even has been 1st class cars on the train), and those stretches that I’ve been on 1st class high speed trains have usually been so short it really hasn’t mattered that much if the seat is a bit wider or not.

But this time the additional luxury on Trieste - Venezia Mestre came much appreciated: the same trip for the other direction was one of the most strenuous ones of this journey. It was absolutely fully packed commuter train that was unbearably hot even though outside temperature was rather chilly. I only found a pull-down seat in the train car lobby, where I was pushed and shoved in stations when the commuters got in and out of the train. And on one station some guy tried to walk away with my luggage, but luckily some shouting and cursing fixed that pronto.

So, it was great that the same journey the other way around was a total opposite: almost empty and well air-conditioned train car, comfortable seat, electricity for the laptop and even complimentary prosecco together with some snacks!

So wouldn’t have minded staying on that train for even longer, but the first leg to Venezia Mestre wasn’t much longer than an hour. In Mestre there was an hours worth of wait for the Bologna train, but the bar in the station is really crappy. I had already found a much better alternative for passing the time on previous occasion: just across the street from the station is a bar called Soul Kitchen, with nice, modern ambience, friendly service, great wines & free wifi. It is so nice of a place, I even bothered to make a tip on Foursquare! ;) So I ordered a glass of Valpolicella and made the latest updates to the blog. The wine and ambience were so relaxing that I almost forgot the passing of the time. 9 minutes before the train to Bologna was supposed to leave, I realized I was in a hurry. Quick payment at the counter, rushing across the street and hurrying through the underpass to the platform I in the end did make the train on time.

The Venezia - Rome evening train I hopped on was real tourist line: the 1st class car was filled with chatter in American English. Apparently the Americans had been very thirsty for prosecco as the staff was already out of it when they got to my seat ;) Not much sceneries to look at after dark usually, but now there was an absolutely gorgeous full moon hanging low tinted in red.

Diavolezza - Tirano

From Bernina Diavolezza I hopped on the Bernina Express again, to complete the UNESCO World Heritage route to Tirano. The route from Bernina Diavolezza onwards is actually the most stunning of the route in my mind. The train still keeps on rising from the 2km height of Diavolezza station and the landscape looks so harsh & hostile it’s as if we’re deep in the Siberia - nothing but snow and rocks as far as the eye can see. And as the clouds are definitely back for good again, it’s actually quite not that far that the eye can see. You can only here and there get a glimpse of the nearby peaks, and sometimes the visibility drops to zero and all you can see from the window is the solid whiteness of the cloud. At some points the scenes look almost alien, as if were on some other planet already: stones and rocky hills of various tones of brown and yellow, with white of the snow here and there and the mist of the clouds being blown by the winds on the hills.

But again, as we start the decline from the top the landscape becomes less hostile and trees and plants reappear in the scenery with finally even some green in the fields when we come down to the first valleys. It’s funny how at some point in a valley you think the train has already done all the descending there is to do, but then yet another steep decline starts as we head down to yet another valley another kilometer below the first one - that really puts the heights of the mountains into perspective!

The finale of the Bernina Express is a unique 360 spin of the track where the train makes the final descent into the valley where the end of the tracks, Tirano is located. And with that spin it is time say goodbye to Switzerland as the train makes the final couple of kilometers to Tirano already on the Italian territory. Danke, grazie, merci Switzerland - it was quite a ride!

Andermatt - St. Moritz - Bernina Diavolezza

One of the most well known train routes in Switzerland sightseeing-wise is the Glacier Express, running from Zermat in the west near Matterhorn to St. Moritz in the east. And again the sights come with a high price, well over 100€ for the whole trip (and again not covered with Interrail ticket). Last spring I did a day trip with a car from Italian North-Western town of Stresa to Zermat, driving on roads following the Glacier Express tracks in that part - so this time I chose to enjoy landscapes on the eastern part of the track. There’s only a rather short passage from Andermatt towards St Moritz (until Disentis) that isn’t covered with Interrail ticket, so I was able to do the trip without breaking the bank.

Andermatt was already quite high (around 1,5km) and had loads of snow, but the track took a steep rise again heading east and the views got more and more arctic by each twist of the track. From Andermatt the train was full of skiers, but they all left on the next stop so I was again left in privacy of an own train car enjoying snow-filled sceneries left and right of the train, with windows pulled down for better photo-ops. The high point of the track is Oberalppass, at 2033m where the sights are absolutely arctic: snow everywhere even in April. From there the train starts heading downwards and the amount of snow in the landscape little by little goes down to zero, still offering gorgeous Alpine views.

I highly suggest paying for the Andermatt - Disentis part if you’re traveling with Interrail pass - I don’t think it was more than 10€, but it offered perhaps the most exotic, arctic views I’ve ever seen.

What really amazes me about the Swiss landscape, is how much the landscape can vary even in short passages. From the classic Alpine hillside villages near Disentis, there’s a huge change continuing eastward towards Reichenau: suddenly the train is passing a sweeping river with staggering rock formations on the opposite side with pine trees growing in almost vertical cliffsides. Quite unlike any other scenery I’ve so far seen in Switzerland. And then as the route starts to rise again towards St. Moritz we get again more and more snow.

From Reichenau onwards I was on the Bernina Express track, which is an UNESCO World Heritage site and again one of the most famous train tracks in Switzerland. And for a reason. There’s a great variety of gorgeous landscapes, lots of height variation too and beautifully constructed bridges. And it’s all covered with the Interrail pass, so a must for all interrailers in Switzerland!

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.

Montreux - Interlaken, 3h

First real Alpine passage on a train for me, on a route that’s been buffed as one of the most scenic in Switzerland. The GoldenPass company who operate it have some sleek new trains that are optimized for viewing landscapes - e.g. including windows also on the roof of the car, and some even have seats right in the nose of the train for extra-special vantage point for the landscape. I hopped on a more normal train, that suited my schedule the best, on a charming old local train car.

And yes, the landscape is beautiful. Even though there are some steep inclines, the route doesn’t go really high up (~ 1km I think) and doesn’t get really close to mountains either but there are really quaint rural landscapes with forests, fields, cottages and cute little villages. And the train travels on a very curvaceous track due to the challenging geography, so the ride offers some sweeping panoramas with variating viewpoints to much spectator delight. There are no leaves in the trees yet even in lower altitudes, so the landscape definitely was not at it’s best. I’d dare to speculate that it is quite stunning really when nature is really blooming (or snow has really taken over the landscape).

There was an exchange of trains in Zweizimmen, and I decided to have a much delayed lunch there instead of continuing directly to Interlaken. Well, I would have been better of hopping off on one of the much nicer looking villages earlier on the track, but was too excited to stop there yet. The sausage-cheese -salad turned out to be drowned in a whole lotta mayo, as seems to be the norm around here. Good thing I was really, really hungry, otherwise it could have been left on the plate. The small villages on the way also looked like perfect place to stay for the night in a classic Alpine rural landscape, I actually would have preferred some of them to Montreux. Oh well, next time then.

It’s really difficult to photograph the Alpine landscapes all and all - the huge scale of the vista just doesn’t capture well. And trying to do it from a moving train is another challenge: the viewpoint changes so often with twists and turns on the track. And then there are of course the technical difficulties like slow focusing camera and reflections from the window. The final thing could’ve been easily fixed though if I would’ve noticed earlier that you can actually slide down the windows on most cars in trains here. Without the stained glass between the scenery and the camera, at least the resulting shot will be cleaner & sharper if not better in any other means…

Dijon - Lausanne - Montreux

2h 54min. TGV 9273 + regional 12177.

What a change of scenery! It doesn’t take more than an hour from Dijon for the landscape and houses to change into definite Alpine look. Even couple of patches of snow in the shadows, a shocking sight after leaving all that ice&cold behind two weeks ago and having enjoyed mediterranean warmth & sunshine since! 

The landscape opens up again once we pass the mountains between France and Switzerland, offering a beautiful sunset over the hills and fields. And after a change of train in Lausanne the stunning landscape by the lake Geneva gives a memorable welcome to Switzerland: arriving at the later part of the blue hour, everything is absolutely blue - the lake, the sky, the shadows of the buildings, and the Alps looming there in the background, already almost disappearing to the darkening sky. Magical.

La Spezia - Ventimiglia - Nice

First trip with the Interrail ticket, the previous distances in Italy were so short i.e. cheap it didn’t make sense to use the travel days from the ticket for those yet. Despite the longer distance, this trip too was on regional trains that stopped every 5-10 minutes - a very relaxed way of traveling.

Really gorgeous small beach-front cities just south of Genova, and also Genova itself looked interesting: a big city, with huge harbor and French influences.

The much advertised scenic route from Ventimiglia to Nice turned out to be ironically mostly in a tunnel, but the brief glimpses that were offered really were quite spectacular - especially tall buildings of Monaco on the huge & steep hillside is very dramatic. Monaco itself was passed in a tunnel, and the local train was filled with commuters heading Nice and beyond.

Pisa - La Spezia. Tren regionale 8667.

Journey ≥ destination.

First train trip: Roma - Orvieto, 1.5h

The tracks begin here. From Roma Termini to be exact. Feels good to me on the move!

First trip is an easy 1,5h regional train ride to Orvieto. Again amazed by the low prices & high quality of Italian train system - the regional train 2nd class has more space and better seats than 1st class long-hauls in Finland, and the cost of 7,30€ couldn’t get you past the metropolitan area from Helsinki.