Bernina Express

I am writing this from Zurich, the first time in a month that my port of call hasn’t been in Italy.  When we arrived tonight I told Shelley that in an odd way, saying we’re in Zurich feels more exotic than Rome or Paris (where we’re headed tomorrow).

We woke up this morning in Tirano, Italy, which is as far north as you can go before crossing into Switzerland.  We went to Tirano in order to experience riding the Bernina Express.

I discovered the Bernina Express when doing research on train travel from Paris to Lucca, back when we thought we would do Paris on the front end of the trip.  I came across a couple of articles saying that it was the most scenic train ride in Europe, and decided that it should be part of our adventure.

The Express runs through the Swiss Alps between Tirano and Chur in Switzerland.  We left at 2:00 p.m. this afternoon, and over the next four hours viewed amazing scenery from glaciers to gorges and engineering feats hard to imagine.  It was a great trip, but to continue a theme addressed before in this blog, after amazing view after amazing view, it’s hard to be amazed again and again.

The Bernina Express runs 122 kilometers, rises 1800 meters across the Alps, topping out at 7400 feet, and goes through 55 tunnels and over 196 bridges and viaducts.  It dates back to 1910, was one of the things that spurred the growth of Alpine tourism, and today is UNESCO World Heritage site.  It doesn’t go through, but leads to renowned resorts such as St. Moritz and Davos.

We had reserved tickets, and arrive half an hour before departure, but couldn’t find our car (#4).  It soon became apparent why.  There are two Bernina Express trains during the summer, both which leave at approximately the same time, and when the second train pulled, there was our car.

I didn’t realize how close Switzerland was, but within two minutes after we left we could see the border crossing on the road that ran alongside the track.  Several minutes later we went through what might be the most famous architectural feature along the route, the Bruscio Circular Viaduct, which is a corkscrew-like series of turns that allows the train to dramatically change elevation in a short span.  We were able to see where we had just come from as we completed a series of turns that produce a 360 degree curve.

We then passed through the center of the small village of Poschiavo, which lies next to a mirror-like lake.  Throughout the trip, the water was very green.  After leaving Poschiavo, the train goes up a series of switchbacks so that we were able to look back at the village and the valley four or five different time from different elevations.  There was one truck that passed by us on the road, almost close enough to touch, and ten minutes later, the same truck looked ant-sized.

As we moved into the higher elevations we began to see snow, and before long we saw several glaciers, and around them several breathtaking waterfalls.  There wasn’t much sign of life, with only scattered houses, some of which seemed without any connection to the outside world, but at one point we passed cows grazing on a very steep hillside.  They obviously belonged to someone, but we saw no evidence of a farm or barn.  I found myself worrying about them.  When Shelley and I did our cross-country trip in 1981, we were at Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota and heard the story about why there are herds of buffalo there.  The buffalo are replacements for the cows that originally grazed there, but the cows had a propensity for walking off the side of a cliff, something buffalo are smart enough to know better than.  Perhaps Swiss cows are more intelligent than their South Dakota relatives, and perhaps that is true for more than cows.

Perhaps more impressive than the natural beauty was the man-made beauty in the engineering needed to pull off an undertaking like the Bernina Express.  In the first place, the train is electric, running on direct current, so that infrastructure had to be built over a very challenging landscape.  Several times today, Shelley and I looked at the electric cables and wiring running through the Alps and couldn’t imagine how someone got the idea more than a hundred years ago, how someone pulled off the engineering feat, and how someone manages the maintenance today.  That’s just the electricity.  All the stone bridges and tunnels are feats of wonder, especially the Albula tunnel which runs for 3.7 miles through a mountain.

The Alps were breathtaking, and there was so much beauty that numerous times during the afternoon I had the urge to sing “Edelweiss.”  We’ve spent two long days on the train, and train travel can be exhausting, but understanding and appreciating the rail experience is a way to understand and appreciate Europe.  It was a very worthwhile day and an experience to remember.