Switzerland by train: cutting-edge railways deliver glorious alpine vistas and history galore

The Swiss are record-breaking rail travellers, spending more time in trains than even the Japanese. A dense network of often improbable lines wraps around and perforates the country’s many high mountains, sewing 26 disparate cantons into a single nation.

Upon its 1882 opening, the Gotthard line – through extremely challenging terrain and using spiral tunnels, long galleried sections and dozens of bridges – was celebrated as a marvel of engineering. It climbed to a 15km summit tunnel, then the longest of its kind anywhere in the world.

The line was regarded as essential to the Swiss economy, ensuring that trade flowed through the country rather than around it. But in the route’s first year of operation, a million passengers came for the views of giddying drops, of steep mountainsides dotted with cattle, and of hidden valleys not even served by footpaths.

Now, the opening of a 57km tunnel through the base of the Saint-Gotthard Massif has reclaimed for the Swiss the title of world’s longest rail-tunnel builders. More impor­tantly, it has freed capacity on the original route for the newly inaugurated Gotthard Panorama Express, the wrap­around win­dows of which offer views of CinemaScope scale.

The experience begins not on rails but afloat, on one of the century-old paddle steamers that departs from docks conve­niently close to Lucerne city’s station. The vessel waddles in a stately fashion from one end of Lake Lucerne to the other, zig-zagging between tiny towns of sharply spired churches and solid-looking wooden houses on narrow stretches of flat land that are dwarfed by the surrounding mountains.