You are going to experience now two of the world's great train rides. We’re going through Switzerland on the Glacier Express and then you'll take the Bernina Express, traveling from one end of the country to the other. Following is the text of the movie. Photos, videos, links and maps will be added later.
“We’re riding on the Glacier Express from Zermatt to St Moritz. It’s one of the most spectacular and scenic rail routes you can find any place in the world. It goes through something like a hundred tunnels, over three hundred little bridges, and mostly it's this wild natural scenery with great mountains all around us and mountain streams, glaciers in the tops of the mountains.
And it's a very comfortable ride on this Swiss train. You can’t get much better than this. It takes about eight hours to get from Zermatt to St Moritz. You’re crossing almost the entire country of Switzerland, and it's eight of the prettiest hours that you'll ever enjoy while traveling through Europe.
You can see the valley that has the town of Andermatt way back there. We’re kind of at the crossroads of the eastern part of Switzerland and the western part. The Gotthard Tunnel runs through this particular region and there are spectacular mountains all around us.
We are riding along on the Glacier Express from one end of Switzerland to the other. We got on in Zermatt in the morning and will be riding all day through some of the most beautiful scenery in Europe, right through the heart of the Alps on our way to St Moritz.
The Glacier Express is one of the most famous train rides in the world and we’re finding out why today. There are beautiful mountains towering above us, we’re passing various river valleys, the Rhône River Valley runs along much of the course.
You can't get hungry on this trip because they feed you very well, and plenty of your favorite beverages to go along with it. Real food cooked in their onboard kitchen and served to you right at your table. They dish it out family-style with those big platters of food just coming out time after time in, and giving you as much as you want to eat. It's really quite a feast and made that much more delicious with that beautiful scenery gliding by.
Notice the tall viaduct holding up tracks that lead into the tunnel, one of the most famous sites along the Glacier Express. The hours flew by quickly and this leg of the journey has come to an end.
Now we have arrived in St Moritz. We will take the Bernina Express today. Let's get back on the train. Now we’ve got a change going, we’ve go to catch the train.
In the southeastern tip of the country you will enjoy some very spectacular scenery: mountain peaks and beautiful valley bottoms. We’ve seen some sheep and we've seen hikers out there. Beautiful pine forests all the way along.
And it's a very smooth ride, even though it's pretty curvy. The trip involves going up to 7000 feet elevation, quite a spectacular train ride. There arebeautiful pine forests, snow-covered mountain peaks. We have some misty fog now and then, and green valley bottoms, little streams, there's hikers out there walking around enjoying the scenery, and all in all it's a wonderful two-hour ride.
So we are in the very southeastern part of Switzerland right now, and while it is Switzerland, they speak Italian here, and the architecture is Italian, and the cuisine is Italian. It’s similar to the Ticino which is a large part of Switzerland by Lugano that's in the Italian cultural area, even though it's within the country of Switzerland.
We are entering some very sharp curves here because we're descending from Switzerland's highest mountain pass into the lower valley, and the scenery is getting prettier and prettier. We’re getting more Italian with each mile that we travel, and this ride is still very smooth. It's the steepest train ride in the world that does not use a cog railway system. It’s what they call adhesion, where it’s just steel wheel on steel tracks.
To make up for the gradient there are a lot of curves. In fact the train itself travels twice as far as it would have to if it went in a straight line because of all the curves that we are going through. And the curves are kind of nice, they give you all the different angles on the scenery. One moment the valley is out on this side of the train and the next moment it’s off on the other side of the train. You go into a tunnel and spiral around and come out the other way, and it's all a little bit confusing but the at same time keeps things quite interesting and exciting.
