GoldenPass Express: The new Swiss train that’s reinventing luxury rail travel | Travel
There are all sorts of reasons people love Switzerland — stretchy cheese, vitamin-enhanced chocolate, mountains you can recognise in silhouette — but for me it’s mainly the railways. Inter-city mainline services shift from meditative to mind-blowing on a single journey. Cogwheel workhorses accomplish seemingly impossible feats. All-conquering trains carry you through mountains, not only with conductors who check tickets in four languages but which also — get this — run on time. It’s heavenly territory for rail fanatics (or ferroequinologists) and, with the December 11 launch of one of the most exciting rail projects yet, things have just got a whole lot more edge-of-the-seat.
This month, I was in Montreux to preview the new GoldenPass Express, a service that takes three hours and 15 minutes to make its way from the Lavaux vineyard terraces of Lake Geneva to the glaciers of Interlaken. I was particularly enjoying my leather seat, so gadget-laden it wouldn’t look out of place in the cockpit of an Aston Martin. There was a button to swivel the chair 360 degrees or pivot me towards the immersive panoramic window — no hard feelings to the passenger opposite. There was a button to pop the leg-rest, one to tilt the seat like a sunlounger and one to warm my bum. This was in prestige class but first and second aren’t too shabby: comfy seats with headrests, fold-out tables, plug points that work, and unrestricted window views. Outside, snow had dusted the tapered mountaintops and the train — silent and steady — gave me views from crumpled peaks to rodeos of cows with perfectly set horns. I had a breathless, ascending sense of euphoria. Sorry, Thameslink, but you just don’t come close.
Inside prestige class
JO BERSIER / SWISS TRAVEL
Although the GoldenPass Express is a new high in train travel-bragging, it’s one that’s almost exactly 150 years late. Ask Swiss rail fan Thomas Bucher — project manager for the train’s parent company Montreux…
..