Little Trains to Faraway Places

1. Switzerland’s Leisurely Expresses (1977)

switzerland’s leisurely expresses T he valley of the upper Rhone in southeastern Switzerland had been broad, green, and fertile for the roughly 25 miles we’d traveled from the railway-junction town of Brig. Now, as our little train reached Oberwald, the mountains began to close in dramatically. Laurel and I were with Jennifer and Emily, our then-young daughters, aboard the Glacier Express on the rails of the Furka-Oberalp, one of the three independent meter-gauge railways that (at the time) operated this summer-only tourist-toting train between Zermatt and St. Moritz, Switzerland’s quintessentially luxe resorts. Like virtually all Swiss railways, these three lines were electrified. The Furka-Oberalp was a mixed rack-and-pinion (cogwheel) and adhesion line, and our locomotive, No. 33, slowed to engage the rack rail. The 33, a B-B (indicating two four-wheel trucks) box cab, dated from 1941 and thus was on hand when electrification was inaugurated on the FO. We were in for a stiff climb through a spiral tunnel to the town of   Gletsch—“glacier” in German ,andwewereridingthroughtheGerman-speakingregionof thistinybut diverse country, where no fewer than four languages are spoken. • 1 Book 1.indb 9 2/16/10 8:47:54 AM .10. It was summer, July 1977, but we were growing chilly as we climbed. Still, I was leaning out through the broad window of our coach, craning my neck to glimpse the spectacle I knew lay ahead: the Rhone Glacier. Suddenly there it was—a mass of azure ice, incredible even at a distance; from it gushed the unendingfreshetofice-meltthatformstheheadwatersoftheRhoneRiver.At 11:43, exactly on time, the train that takes its name from the Rhone Glacier eased to a stop at Gletsch, a town which does, too. The eastbound journey of the Glacier Express had begun three hours earlier , at 8:44 am, at Zermatt. This resort at the foot of a soaring, iconic tor, the 14,693-foot Matterhorn, banned automobiles then—and still does. Passengers who had stayed overnight amid the elegance of the Zermatterhof, the city’s classic Old World hotel, might have arrived at the chalet-style railway station in a trim blue carriage lettered for that hotel, pulled by a matched pair of dappled horses and attended by a liveried coachman and a footman in tails.TheGlacierExpress,waitingthereonthetracksoftheBrig-Visp-Zermatt Railway, was a modern and comfortable conveyance, yet one with ties to an era when horse-drawn travel had been much less of an anomaly than it was when we visited Zermatt. At the head of the Glacier Express was a B-B electric locomotive of steeple-cab design, one of six delivered beginning in August 1929 to open the electrification on what was then the Visp-Zermatt Railway. Though very different in appearance, these VZ locomotives in fact were the mechanical and electrical prototypes for the Furka-Oberalp box cabs that were built a dozen years later. The steeple-cab and four trailing coaches were bright red, a livery all BVZ and FO motive power and rolling stock shared— the commonality a result, no doubt, of the operating partnership that existed between those lines from 1925 to 1960. (On January 1, 2003, the BVZ and FO would merge to form the Matterhorn Gotthard Railway.) Actually, the distinction on these railroads between motive power and rolling stock was blurred, since paired electric motor coaches—and, in the case of FO, motorized baggage cars—often served in place of locomotives. Affixed to the sides of the red coaches, below the windows, metal destination signs read “Glacier Express”; on some the bottom line was Chur, on others, St. Moritz. The descent from Zermatt was through the narrow valley of the Matter VispRiver,withtoweringmountainsimpingingandlimitingthescopeofvistas . There were four rack-and-pinion stretches on the BVZ, where cogwheels engaged a ladderlike center rail allowing locomotives or motor cars to hoist themselves up (or drop safely down) the grade. One of these was through Kipfen Gorge, with its foaming, tumbling staircase of waterfalls. At Visp, for a time the railway’s northern terminus and the location of its shops, the BVZ entered the spacious valley of the Rhone and turned sharply eastward l i t t l e t r a i n s t o f a r a w a y p l a c e s Book 1.indb 10 2/16/10 8:47:54 AM .11. to follow...