TRAIN # 50 – 23:30 Lausanne to Dole (Continued)
The lad was from Bolton and was studying Italian at Sheffield Polytechnic. He was going home after a year teaching English in Italy. We talked to him at length about travel, teaching and Interrailing. The train was mercifully a little late arriving into Dole, shortening our wait time for the train to Bern to about an hour.
In contrast to our expectations, Dole had quite a nice waiting room, although it was unsurprisingly deserted at 02:30. There was an automatic photo booth in the corner and on the spur of the moment we decided to take two commemorative pictures. Then we hit a snag: photos were five francs each and we only had nine in coins.
We went over to the ticket office to ask the man behind the counter if he would change two fifty centime pieces for a franc. He refused with all the Gallic nonchalance he could muster. We had almost given up when we noticed a man standing outside with a bike. “bien sur” he said as he handed us a franc. Whatever he was doing standing there at that time in the morning we could not fathom but he certainly came in useful.
TRAIN # 51 – 03:20 Dole to Spiez
We were the only takers for the 03:20 departure from Dole, a Paris to Interlaken overnight express, and we praised SNCF to the heavens when we managed to find one spare compartment right at the back. I slept on and off for four hours despite intrusions by various collectors and passport officials. I was finally woken after seven by screaming kids kicking the wall of the adjacent compartment. My friend was still asleep.
We had arrived at what look liked the kind of Swiss equivalent of Birmingham New Street station. I was not sure where we were. I saw a sign up the platform and started to move up the corridor to get a better look. As I got close the train started to move out of the station and a sign revealed itself, Bern.
We weren’t overly concerned that we had missed our stop. I had a look at the timetable and decided to spend half an hour riding down to Spiez and then catch the next train back to Bern.
TRAIN # 52 – 08:56 Spiez to Bern
We waited at Spiez. It was getting sunny but it was still quite cold. Being surrounded by all the mountains made it feel colder than it was. The carriage we sat in on the way back to Bern belonged to the independent BLS company. It was quite plush. We took turns to have a wash in the rather nice toilet and then sat down to a bread and jam breakfast. We arrived back in Bern feeling quite clean, no longer hungry but still pretty tired.
BERN
We got to Bern and, having put the rucksacks in the locker, went out for a quick look around. We met a guy in the street who showed us the remains of the church underneath the precinct. Then we walked down the rather attractive shopping street past the clock tower to the bear pit.
It was actually a lovely little city to walk around. We went back to the station via the cathedral stepping inside to admire its stain glass window. Although by this point in the trip, we both agreed, all the cathedrals were starting to merge into each other.
Back at the station, the luggage locker wouldn’t open for some reason. We called for assistance and by the time the problem was sorted we had missed the 12:16 train to Geneva that we had planned on catching. We sat on the platform eating some more of our Italian bread rolls waiting for the next one.
TRAIN #53 – 13:16 Bern to Geneva
The Swiss timetable worked on a regular-interval ‘Taktfahrplan‘ system that had been introduced in 1982. Trains to each destination left at the same minutes past the hour throughout the day. We had noticed back at Spiez that the trains to Bern went at XX:56, now it was XX:16 to Geneva. The next service was the 13:16.
The carriages of the SBB (or CFF as it was denoted in French) were quite distinctive too. Turned out in dark green livery with double folding doors at each end, most of them were open plan with bays of four seats on each side of a central aisle. Our journey on the 13:16 was uneventful. We sat opposite an annoying American and his Irish friend for a while but managed to move. We got to Geneva just before three.
GENEVA
We had literally run out of Swiss money and so, unable to afford a locker, we decided to hump the rucksacks around Geneva for an hour or so. We went down to the lake and watched the famous geyser spurting away. We passed through the Jardin Anglais and wandered back through the old town.
We got lost and asked a very friendly Swiss woman for directions. Geneva, we decided was a very pleasant place. It was just expensive. We walked past rows of shops selling delicious looking chocolates, and more than once I was tempted to use the Access card to buy some.
We walked back to the Reformation Wall, sat in the park, walked through the Bel-Air Square and went back to the station. On the way we put our faces up to the window of a bread shop looking at all the beautiful stuff they had inside. Our poverty was, to a large extent, self-imposed of course. We had plenty of Italian lira, French francs and traveller’s cheques, we were just in the wrong place to spend any of them.
We had already decided we had had enough. We were heading back to Italy for the final couple of cities on the itinerary; Florence and Pisa and then to Marseille, Paris and home. As we waited at Geneva, we contemplated going via Brig and spending some time there before continuing on to Milan in the early hours.
TRAIN #54 – 17:45 Geneva to Lausanne
We boarded the 17:45 train which was itself heading to Milan. We got a compartment in one of the Italian FS Eurofirma carriages with two young girls and an elderly couple. We consulted the timetable again and decided to abandon the Brig route and go instead only to Lausanne. I had remembered the connection from the ‘Wiener Walzer’ at Innsbruck to Florence.
If we changed at Lausanne and went to Zurich, we would have a twenty minute or so connection into the ‘Wiener Walzer’ for Innsbruck. There we could make the fifteen minute connection into the ‘Brenner Express’ at 01:42. We could then head directly to Florence for a scheduled arrival of 09:12. We trusted the Swiss and the Austrians to make the connections, but we somehow doubted the Italians would get us to Florence for exactly 09:12.
TRAIN # 54 – 18:30 Lausanne to Zurich
We changed at Lausanne onto a full Swiss regional train. We were separated and I sat next to an elderly gentleman. As it started to get dark outside, I fell asleep and slept much of the way to Zurich. We arrived on time at 20:54.
As we waited for the next train on the platform we met an Austrian guy who had been touring Switzerland by cycle. He was now hoping to get home on the train. We were all waiting for our old friend the ‘Wiener Walzer‘. We had taken it on Friday from Basel to Vienna but now we were just using it for the short hop to Innsbruck.
TRAIN # 55 – 21:20 Zurich to Innsbruck
The ‘Walzer’ showed up bang on time at 21:09. We found an empty compartment in an OBB carriage but were soon joined by four people who turned out to be the most entertaining travelling companions of the whole trip.
We met Mirabelle, her mother, Doug and his girlfriend. For some reason we all clicked and for the next four hours we talked together about economics, history, Interrailing and politics. For the first hour or two somebody with a guitar was out in the corridor providing a little light background music.
Mirabelle and her mother were from Maryland, USA and were travelling from Zurich to Salzburg. Mirabelle was in her early twenties and about to start her Eurail pass for two months. Her mother was there to guide her through the first few weeks.
Mirabelle was a college dropout and failed bank teller. Her mother was an economist, although as we discovered later when we started talking about exchange rates, probably not a very good one.
Doug on the other hand was English and had worked for British Rail printing the update sheets that drivers from St Pancras received at the start of their shifts. He was in his early thirties and told us that he had been an ardent member of the Socialist Workers Party for more than ten years.
He was hammered on vodka and continued to take swigs from his bottle as he explained the whole economic system from a Marxist point of view to the Americans. Mirabelle’s mother had thought that Mrs. Thatcher was actually doing a lot of good. Doug soon put her right on that.
Doug then fell asleep and he slept like a baby while his girlfriend, who was from Wales, tried to prop him up. Eventually he fell on the floor and we had to lift him back onto his seat.
As he slept, his girlfriend explained that they were travelling to Budapest and then on to Greece. Doug, she explained, could speak Greek. He had been a religious studies scholar at the University of Lancaster before he was thrown out for his Socialist Worker activities.
When we got to Innsbruck at 01:27 we didn’t really want to get off. The nicest thing was the admiration Mirabelle and her mother had shown to us for our “conquering Europe” in only 23 days. We had boasted about never having needed any accommodation since Brussels and Mirabelle, only on her first overnight trip, had thought the whole thing was wonderful. We actually started to think that we had achieved something worthwhile after all.
Forty Years Later….
- The Swiss railway system still works on the Taktfahrplan principle and has perfected it over the years.
- Swiss trains continue to be the most punctual in Europe.
- The Wiener Walzer, now a Euronight ‘EN’ train linking Zurich and Budapest, is still running in 2026.
- I have been back to Switzerland on business trips and for leisure but it remains a country that I have not visited as much as I would like.
