LOCARNO, Switzerland — The trains are new, modern, run on time, and everyone uses them to go everywhere.
Clearly, I’m not at home.
In fact, and as the dateline has given away, I am in Switzerland. This is night two of my second trip here, this time a three-week adventure. And while I am badly jet-lagged, I have promised to provide reports on the trip to the greatest extent my schedule allows. My primary reason for being here is to represent the magazine on the Trains “2023 Majestic Switzerland by Rail Tour,” organized by our friends at Special Interest Tours.
But I’m also here to work on some stories for the magazine, and spending these first few days engaging in some solo travel as part of that. Then I’ll join the first part of a media tour on public transportation in Switzerland arranged by Switzerland Tourism. I can’t partake in the whole of that because it overlaps our own tour, but it’s nice to reestablish our working relationship with the Swiss Tourism folks, who were great partners with Trains for almost a decade before COVID got in the way.
Swiss Tourism has also helped me with a couple of things during my solo travels, one of which was today (to take things slightly out of order). Our contact had suggested I take Gotthard Tunnel Experience tour run out of the town of Erstfeld by Uri Tourism (Uri being the canton where Erstfeld is located). This 2- to 2½-hour tour takes visitors inside one of the construction tunnels for the Gotthard Base Tunnel, the world’s longest rail tunnel, offers a lot of insight about how it was built, and concludes with a chance to look through a viewing window as trains pass at speeds up to 235 kilometers per hour (146 mph).
Unfortunately, no trains are passing by that window at the moment. It looks into the west tube of the base tunnel, the one closed since an Aug. 10 derailment that will require repairs expected to run into next year [see “Gotthard Base Tunnel repairs …,” Trains News Wire, Aug. 16, 2024]. And unfortunately for me, the tours during my visit were long since sold out; as the woman from Uri Tourism told me in an email, this is the time of year when they could book every available space twice over and more. (These discussions were well before the derailment; as I understand it, demand is even greater since because the tunnel has been in the news. Truly, there is no such thing as bad publicity.)
Fortunately, they came up with a more than acceptable substitute — a one-hour private version of the tour. My host and guide, Charly, was a project manager on the tunnel’s construction, and is currently in a similar position on the project to build a second tube of the Gotthard Road Tunnel — as soon as we were finished, he was off to a meeting for that. When I thanked him for taking time out of his schedule, he told me, “This is our baby. We are happy to present her to people who are interested.”
I will be writing about the tour at greater length in the future, but for now, suffice it to say, it was fascinating. I learned a lot I did not know — I wish I’d been able to talk to Charly before I wrote my 2017 feature on the Base Tunnel, “The Hole Truth” [February 2017 Trains]. The tour drives you 1.8 kilometers into the Amsteg access tunnel that was part of the construction process. One particular shaft of that tunnel was to be filled in at the end of construction, because there was no real need for it, but Uri Tourism stepped up and organized its use for the Gotthard Tunnel Experience; it has a small theater, a bunch of extremely informative displays, and, of course, that window. This is what it looked like today.
I can’t recommend this experience highly enough. The tours are not regularly run in English, but English tours are available on request. So if you’re in that part of the world — plan ahead. And the tours depart from the Erstfeld train station, so they’re easy to do as part of a Switzerland-by-rail adventure. Swiss Tourism has more information here.
By the way, that picture looking into the empty tunnel? That’s possible only because of the generosity of my Swiss hosts. Because no trains are running and no tour was scheduled, the lights in the tunnel would normally be off. They made sure they were lit so I could get a photo.
The Panoramic pass
To backtrack a bit, I came to Erstfeld after spending my first day in Switzerland on Gotthard Pass — the route almost entirely supplanted by the Base Tunnel but now the primary passenger route to Italy and Italian-speaking Switzerland until the base tunnel is repaired. (SBB, the Swiss Federal Railways, refers to it as “the Panoramic route” in all its media communications about the reroutes during base tunnel repairs.)
The Panoramic route once handled up to 130 freight trains a day, then saw virtually none when the base tunnel opened. Currently, handling about 30 freight trains a day, mostly between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. This is all quite a change from the norm — one passenger train an hour in each direction, plus one Gotthard Panorama Express each way daily — so there are many railfans out to see a show they thought had forever ended when the base tunnel opened.
I was more than happy to join them for the day on Tuesday. My flight landed in Zurich at 6:15 a.m.; at 8, I was on a train from Zurich’s main station to Göschenen, at the north end of the original Gotthard Tunnel. I arrived at 9:50 a.m.; dropped my bag at the front desk of the small hotel where I’d booked a room, then caught a bus to Wassen, only about 10 minutes away, but sadly no longer served by train. This is the famous spot where the rail line snakes around the valley to gain altitude. In the process, it passes a single church three times; this is said to be the most famous church in Switzerland. I spent about 5 hours there, took hundreds of pictures, took the bus back to Göschenen, took a few dozen more shots there — and by then, jet lag was having its way. I was asleep before 9 p.m. — which was just as well since I had to catch the 7:09 a.m. train down to Erstfeld this morning.
There’s more to tell, but this is too long as it. So the rest will have to wait for the next installment.
Editor’s note: At some point, Trains.com is supposed to add a “Travel” section, which is where this belongs — and where it hopefully will be moved eventually. Until then, this report and those that follow will be somewhat miscast under the “Tourist Railroads” heading.
