Glacier Express
Zermatt to St. Moritz

Zermatt is car-free. Not in the loosely enforced sense of a pedestrianised town centre, but genuinely, entirely car-free: private motor vehicles are banned from the village, and the only way in by road ends at Täsch, 5 km below, where a shuttle train runs every 20 minutes. The village is reached only by the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn from Visp, or by helicopter.

The Glacier Express departs from Zermatt station's two-platform terminus. On a clear morning, the Matterhorn - 4,478 metres, distinctly pyramidal - is visible to the south from the platform before the train pulls away heading north down the Matter Valley. The departure is unhurried: the train negotiates the valley floor at modest speed, passing through Stalden and St. Niklaus before reaching Visp in the Rhône valley, where a portion of services also pick up passengers from Brig.

The Matterhorn fills the rear window as Zermatt falls behind - a view you cannot replicate from any other mode of transport.

Between Brig and Andermatt, the Glacier Express passes through the Furka base tunnel - 15.4 kilometres of mountain bored in 1982 to allow year-round operation. Before 1982, the original Furka summit route over the pass at 2,436 metres was only open in summer; the tunnel opened the Glacier Express to winter operation. The original surface route is now operated as a heritage steam railway (Dampfbahn Furka Bergstrecke) in summer months.

Andermatt (1,444 m) is a brief stop - historically a strategic crossroads where the Gotthard, Furka, Susten, and Oberalp passes converge. The station platform is short and the stop usually no more than a few minutes. South of the village the ski resort of SkiArena Andermatt-Sedrun is visible on the surrounding slopes.

The Oberalp Pass at 2,033 metres: the highest point on any regular Swiss rail service - crossed in the open air, no tunnel, in all seasons.

The climb from Andermatt to the Oberalp summit is the most dramatic section of the entire journey. The train works its way up the Urseren Valley, passing through Hospental and climbing steadily to the pass. At the summit station - Oberalppass, 2,033 m - the landscape is genuinely alpine: snow patches through June, a frozen lake in winter (Lai da Oberalp), and rock faces above the treeline on all sides. This is the watershed between the Rhine drainage and the Rhône drainage: water on the west side of the pass flows eventually to the Mediterranean via Lake Geneva; water on the east side flows to the North Sea via the Rhine.

The descent east from the summit follows the Anterior Rhine (Vorderrhein) toward Disentis/Mustér (1,130 m), where the Benedictine monastery founded in 720 AD stands above the valley. The language switches here from German to Romansh - Disentis is Mustér in Romansh, one of the four official languages of Switzerland and spoken by around 35,000 people in Graubünden.

St. Moritz station sits at 1,775 metres above sea level, at the foot of the valley that contains the Engadine lakes. The Glacier Express arrives at the terminus platform after nearly eight hours of Alpine transit - a journey that has crossed two cantons, three languages, and the watershed of Central Europe.

The town is compact and walkable from the station. St. Moritz-Dorf - the main village on the hillside - is a 10-minute walk uphill from the station; St. Moritz-Bad, on the lakeshore, is a 15-minute walk along the lake path. The frozen Lake St. Moritz (Lej da San Murezzan) is directly below the town centre in winter and a swimming lake in summer.

The town has hosted the Winter Olympics twice (1928 and 1948) and is the original destination for British winter sports tourists who came here in the late 19th century and, according to local legend, invented the bobsled and skeleton disciplines. The Cresta Run, the world's original bobsled track (built 1884–1885), still operates at nearby Celerina and is unique to St. Moritz.