Swiss trains — DIY planning

I’m often asked to assist with travel plans in Switzerland because I grew up there, know the three languages and have been there at least once a year since 1981. Gene McPherson’s wonderful trip report, “Bicycling Switzerland and No. Italy” (March ’10, p. 32), brings to mind some points that I’d like to share.

Switzerland is expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. There are unbelievable bargains to be had when the European budget airlines fight it out with the high-speed trains. Also, in searching for the less-than-fastest trains, the exorbitant becomes affordable. I travel a bit slower, I see more, I’m on vacation and “it’s all good.”

Railpasses are expensive and pay for themselves only if you do a lot of crisscrossing. See which Swiss Pass or Swiss Card, if any, suits your needs by visiting www.swisstravelsystem.ch/en. By pricing individual portions, you can find out how much your total train travel adds up to and compare the total with the price of the pass.

You can price each leg on the Swiss train website www.sbb.ch/en/index.htm. Here’s how. Input your trip data, click on “Fare/Buy,” click on “Select Outward Journey” for your choice of connection, then, on the next screen, adjust the date and up come the prices.

Buying tickets “as you go” is easy and is done quickly from vending machines or at staffed ticket counters. There are lots of discounts — for groups, for families, on certain days…. It pays to ask. (Ticket agents speak serviceable English.)

Seat reservations are not required within Switzerland except on the Swiss portions of some international specialty trains, like those heading for France (TGV) or Italy.

Regarding trains, they don’t always have to be the spiffiest. The major city-to-city express trains (no intermediate stops) are not that much faster than the trains that stop in a few cities in between. Case in point, the IC (InterCity) 826, Zürich to Bern nonstop, takes 57 minutes, while the IR (InterRegio) 1926, Zürich to Bern, with four stops along the way, takes about 80 minutes. To vacationers, that half hour hardly matters.

Gene’s party was told that they could not take their rented bikes onto their chosen train from Lau­terbrunnen to Stresa. What tripped up his party was they had been advised to reserve on the CIS train — which at the time was the only one that didn’t accept bikes — and they weren’t aware that they could simply switch to another of the many trains on that route.

Had he been properly advised, Gene could have gone to any station in advance and booked their bikes onto a train of his choice. If one train’s bike allotment had been full, he simply could have picked another train.

(By the way, the famed Cisalpino [CIS] is no more. It was a company running fabulous trains, popularly called Pendolinos, that leaned into curves but kept breaking down. The Cisalpino company also ran nontilting trains for a while, but it has been dissolved. The EuroCity trains are now the fastest between Switzerland and Italy. Only some EC trains accept bicycles.)

How do you look up which trains can take bikes? On the website www.sbb.ch/en/index.htm, click on “Advanced Search,” and midway down the next screen you can select “Carriage of bicycles required (Switzerland only).” Check that, fill in the rest, click on “Search Connections” and watch the timetable choices pop up. On top is the overview, and below are the details of each itinerary.

Click on a train number and you get further details.

For example, for the EC (Euro­City) 57 (just one of the many fast trains running daily from Basel to Milano which, for the eight stops within Switzerland, can be used without seat reservations) leaving Spiez at 14:05 and arriving Stresa at 15:38, it says, reassuringly, “BICYCLES: Self-service loading by sender limited. BICYCLES: Reservation compulsory.”

(Seat reservations on the EC57 are needed only if you go beyond Brig into Italy, but bicycles on the EC57 require reservations no matter what portion of the trip you take them on.)

To figure out how to get from Lauterbrunnen to Spiez, using the EC57 as an example, you would input “Lauterbrunnen-Spiez” and find that all trains first go to Interlaken Ost. The website brings up the quickest connections. If the time between trains seems too short for having to deal with bikes, increase the “waiting time” by picking a later connecting train.

About those rental bikes Gene had, CHF810 (near $757) each per week seems awfully high. Right at the Geneva train station is a branch of Rent A Bike (www.rent-a-bike.ch) with a rate of CHF33 ($31) per day, including a free helmet and no-charge train transport for the bikes. That would have come to about CHF560 for Gene’s entire trip, about a third of what he paid.

I hope that this encourages other readers to take charge of their own planning or, if they use travel advisors, to know how to “trust but verify.”

LORENZ RYCHNER

Denver, CO