With each spectacular experience, I keep thinking it couldn't get any better -- and then it does. As I discovered all over again during my 2-night stay in St. Moritz.
St. Moritz, a world-famous, very high-end resort, lies in a scenic setting on the north shore of a small lake. The slope up which St. Moritz climbs is very steep, and so a number of "streets" are actually staircases -- and many other narrow alleyways are now pedestrians-only. Good thing too -- walking in St. Moritz is always either all acceleration uphill or all braking downbound.
The view from the sun terrace at my hotel is beautiful -- especially at a modest rate (for St. Moritz) in a modest but neat and clean hotel, the Hotel Eden. The big castle right below me is the iconic Badrutt's Palace Hotel, one of the older high-end St. Moritz resorts (opened in 1896). It's currently closed for renovations before the real high season here begins in September.
Although my hotel is barely 300 metres in a straight line from the railway station, it takes 15 minutes to walk there as the roads and stairs snake back and forth across the mountainside. In St. Moritz, the concept of "straight-line distance" is totally meaningless.
So is the concept of "budgeting." The two major stores nearest my hotel are Prada and Hermès, which pretty much says it all. The area is full of restaurants offering main courses from CHF45-50 on up (about Cdn$60-65) -- and that's just the main course, no appetizer, no dessert, no drinks. I lucked out and found a more reasonably priced pizzeria in another modest hotel nearby -- Hotel and Pizzeria Arte. Very tasty and very reasonable (by St. Moritz standards).
So with all those financial obstacles, why stay in St. Moritz at all? The answer: I hadn't learned yet that I didn't need to. To be explained at the end of the post.
My reason for being here was to ride another but much less well-known scenic railway tour. The line is very well-known to rail enthusiasts and train freaks of all nationalities, but the general public have been much slower to catch on. Their loss.
This brings me back to the opening statement of this post. I wasn't referring to St. Moritz in writing that sentence. I had in mind the Bernina Express train tour which I took. Although the train cars are similar to the legendary Glacier Express, the Bernina trip is much shorter -- a mere 2 hours and 20 minutes from St. Moritz to the Italian town of Tirano. It's perfectly easy to ride down that long hill in the morning, spend 2 hours visiting and lunching in Tirano, and ride back up the same afternoon.
But what a ride! Once again, straight-line distance means squat. St. Moritz and Tirano are about 35 kilometres apart in a straight line, but the rail distance is 61 kilometres. The difference is all due to the incredible numbers of curves and spirals and switchbacks which the railway has to take to get up to and down from the Bernina Pass over the Alps, and the fact that almost two-thirds of the line runs at a pretty steady 7% grade, forcing the trains to operate at very slow speeds.
The map shows the Bernina line's location in the southeastern corner of Switzerland.
So, let's begin this spectacular tour with a peaceful morning on the shore of St. Moritz Lake, right by the station.
The climb up to the Bernina Pass is relatively short, but does include one spectacular view of the cluster of high peaks and glaciers known as the Bernina Massif.
The summit is a broad plateau, largely devoid of tree cover. Even at this altitude, though, the Swiss cattle are busy with their summer grazing -- in accordance with centuries-old tradition.
This tiny stream marks the beginnings of the Bernina River which flows north from the pass. In fact, this little stream is called Ova di Bernina.
There are three lakes on the summit, and the biggest one -- Lago Bianco -- also bestrides the divide of land (thanks to a hydro dam). Thus Lago Bianco feeds rivers flowing both ways from the pass, north to the Danube and so to the Black Sea, and south to the Po and into the Adriatic Sea.
The lake is dominated by the huge mass of the peak called Piz Cambrena, and its glacier. That peculiar prefix "Piz" comes from Romansch, by the way, so it's not hard to identify any mountain called "Piz _ _ _ _ _ _ _" as being located in the Graubünden, the Romansch-speaking area of southeastern Switzerland.
Past the end of Lago Bianco, the line begins the long, steep, twisting descent to Tirano. Just after the line starts down, there's a station at Alp Grüm, and we were lucky to be able to take a short photo stop there while waiting for an upbound train to pass. Check out the parallel waterfalls draining from the face of the Palu Glacier, one of the lobes of the Bernina Massif's huge mountaintop icefield.
Not far past Alp Grüm you get this spectacular view of the valley below you. You can see part of the railway with a siding track far below on the left side of the picture. A little higher up on the right side of the picture, you can see the Lago di Poschiavo, which is again much lower in altitude than the railway siding -- and even after the train gets all the way down to Poschiavo, the long haul downhill isn't over yet!
From Alp Grüm, the train has to descend a total height of 1662 metres in just 32.6 kilometres of track to reach Tirano. No wonder the grades are almost continuous at 7% for so much of the distance!
The descent is peppered with tunnels, including some spirals, open-air loops, snow and avalanche sheds, and bridges. It's hard to get good pictures on this stretch because so much of the line is closed in by dense evergreen forests. But in this picture, you can see how the train has to climb in a loop around a narrow valley, complete with a snowshed and a stone bridge.
You do get a good overview of Poschiavo and the lake beyond once you're down to the last 10 or 12 bends and curves before the town.
Eventually you come right down into Poschiavo itself, and find your train running along the dead-centre of the main street like a city tram on steroids!
Past the town, there are lovely views of the Lago di Poschiavo, daydreaming in the warm hazy sunshine.
As soon as the end of the lake goes by, the train resumes its steep descent towards the town of Brusio and the last and most eye-popping engineering work on the line.
Right below Brusio, the railway goes through a loop which covers roughly 420 degrees -- yes, that is considerably more than a full circle. And because the train is descending all the way, the upper part of the loop has to be on a bridge to cross over the lower stretch. Here's the Brusio Circular Viaduct.
For obvious reasons, the Brusio viaduct is hard to photograph while you're rolling around it. So here's an Internet aerial photo showing a Bernina Express train going downhill around the loop.
- Own work: http://www.bahnbilder.ch/picture/11543
All this way, the train has been running in Switzerland. We've been passing Italian place names for three-quarters of an hour, but this is only one of a number of southern Alpine valleys which are Italian speaking, but remain part of Switzerland. However, just below Brusio, the train crosses the border and after a few more kilometres (including more street running) arrives in Tirano, Italy.
As you walk from the train into the station building, you pass a disused and closed Customs Office -- because Switzerland belongs to the Schengen Agreement for open borders, even though the country remains outside the membership of the European Union.
Tirano also has a second station, for the Italian state railways -- the two lines can't mix and match because the Bernina, like the Glacier Express, runs on a narrow gauge track with only 1 metre distance between the rails rather than the more conventional 1.435 metre standard gauge. That narrow gauge, by the way, makes it possible for the trains to go around much sharper curves -- and after riding the Bernina line, I can certainly see why it could never have been finished as a standard-gauge railway.
Outside the two stations, there's a fairly routine Italian town -- no wildly exciting historic sites or major-league scenic beauties. Thanks to the railways, there is a decent collection of shops, cafes, restaurants, and wine bars bidding for your tourist dollars. The biggest difference I noticed was in the weather. In St. Moritz, it had been a chilly 8°C fall morning (that's about 46°F), but 2 1/2 hours later in Tirano it was a warm, humid 25°C (77°F).
After a 2-hour break, you board the train again for the return trip to St. Moritz. Especially in mountain country, it's no great surprise that the weather changes and clouds begin to move in as the day goes on. This results in some very dramatic changes in the view compared to the morning trip down the line.
The Bernina Express packed more scenic drama and engineering wizardry into a little over 2 hours than the Glacier Express managed in a full day. Several of us who had done both routes back to back agreed completely that both were great trips, but it was the Bernina Express that provided the truly unforgettable experience.
A couple of helpful hints if you choose to go on this trip. Unlike the Glacier Express from St. Moritz to Zermatt, the Bernina Express is not the only way to travel this entire route at once. Regular scheduled passenger trains of the Rhaetian Railways operate hourly throughout the day.
What does the Express offer that makes it different from the regular trains? [1] Higher panoramic windows in the cars. [2] Less solid wall space between the windows. [3] All seats are reserved. [4] There is a recorded narration which draws your attention to the major scenic highlights as they come into view. [5] In summer, some trains operate with a choice of an open-air viewing car which may not be as comfortable but has no glass at all to wreck the work of the truly dedicated or fanatical photographers. [6] The Express makes a faster trip because it doesn't stop at most of the numerous intermediate stations. [7] The Express operates multiple trains from different stations in the Rhaetian Railways network, so you don't have to start from St. Moritz.
And now you know why I realized that I didn't need to stay in super-steep St. Moritz with its super-steep streets and super-steep prices either.
The advantages of the local trains lie precisely in the fact that you can get off at more intermediate points to hike, to bike, to climb, to make your own more personal mountain experience. And it will be more personal because the Bernina, unlike Zermatt, hasn't become nearly as widely known or popular -- or crowded -- for all of those activities.
Although the ride itself is exciting, there's another reason the Bernina route is unique -- it's the only railway route traversing the Alps which doesn't burrow under the high summits in a tunnel. And the Bernina Pass is very high. The train line tops out at 2,253 metres or 7,392 feet above sea level, and at the summit point you're surrounded by a windswept landscape not far short of being Arctic tundra -- just at the limits of the tree line. Imagine it all covered with snow. And yet, despite the sometimes massive snowfalls, the Bernina railway remains open all year, with trains running hourly in both directions.
Here, from the Internet, is a winter picture of a train approaching the summit of the pass -- and now that I've seen this photo, I really want to take both the Bernina train trip and the Glacier Express in winter!
By Kabelleger / David Gubler (http://www.bahnbilder.ch) -
Own work: http://www.bahnbilder.ch/picture/7458, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14027421
A detailed account of a day trip from St. Moritz in Switzerland to Tirano in Italy, via the dramatic and amazing Bernina Railway.
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