Europe’s Most Scenic Train Ride Takes You Places You Didn’t Think a Train Could Go
It’s a chilly, December morning as I slink into Chur Railway Station in the southeast of Switzerland. Scanning the platforms, I eventually spot it: that trademark red exterior with the curved panoramic windows and the words Bernina Express emblazoned across the side. The other passengers have arrived and there’s a palpable excitement in the air. We are all here for one reason only—to take Europe’s most beautiful train journey.
Frequently named Europe’s most scenic train ride, the Bernina Express is a romantic throwback to the golden age of European rail travel, when the journey was the destination. In just four hours, it takes you from the town of Chur, through the tight valleys of Switzerland’s Graubünden canton, past glaciers and over the highest railway pass in Europe, into the Italian town of Tirano, where in summer you can even find palm trees.
The origins of the Bernina Express go back to the late 19th century, when enterprising hoteliers and ambitious engineers teamed up to forge a transalpine railway line, connecting the Swiss plateau to the up-and-coming resort towns of St. Moritz and Davos, and then down into the Italian region of Lombardy. It was an ambitious plan—the canton of Graubünden is incredibly mountainous and sparsely populated, even by Swiss standards. But the emergence of Alpine tourism, the debonair attitude of the era and the support of the Swiss government, which wanted access to the region’s natural resources, led to work commencing in 1898.