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Published: October 29th 2005
Today we took the Glacier Express from Zermatt to....Chur. Thought I was going to say St. Moritz, didn't you? Well, we bought the GE add on to our Swiss rail pass for a hefty additional fee and our understanding was that it wouldn't require us to use 1 of our 5 rail pass days. The GE ticket we had said Zermatt to Disentis which I questioned from the start, but the Europe Rail folks said it would get us all the way to St. Moritz. When the train stopped in Disentis (about halfway along the 8.5 hour route), a new crew took over representing a different rail company. The conductor came through to check tickets again and requested our ticket to St. Moritz. We showed him what we had and he said - you guessed it - "this is only for Disentis." So he stamped a day off on our rail pass for the portion from Disentis to St. Moritz!!! What a rip off! When you buy the rail passes in the US you can get additional days for $30 US each per person, but once you're over here you are stuck with what you've got. Buying individual tickets for a
Mountains
Basically, that could have been the title of any of these posts...particular route is extremely expensive! So we made a split second decision to change trains in Chur, and head to Zurich skipping St. Moritz all together. We had about 10 minutes to cancel our hotel reservation without penalty, but luckily there was an Australian woman across from us who offered her cell phone. It was about a 20 minute wait in Chur, then we were whisked away on a double-decker high speed train to Zurich.
I must say the views on the Glacier Express are spectacular. The stretch from Visp into Zermatt was amazing. Crossing the Oberalp Pass was neat also. However it was a cloudy day so there wasn't as much to see of the high peaks. The key is you can take regular trains the whole distance of the Glacier Express without paying the extra for the panoramic car (does increase the views) and recorded bits of narration (not great). J reminded me that on the Alaska Railroad between Anchorage and Denali, we had a guide in the car with us who told the history of the area and interesting facts along the 10 hour trip - all for no extra charge. Nice.
Our recommendation would
Cloudy Village
This is a pretty typical Swiss village on our one cloudy day in Switzerland. be to skip the Glacier Express ticket and stick with the normal train, where you can roll down the windows and more easily take photos. The fact that we have only a few pictures here from the trip demonstrates that the weather was bad. This was supposed to be our most scenic day!
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usaircon
non-member comment
my opinion
When me and my mom went we were both rather unimpressed with the GE, we went from andermatt to zermatt and were not thrilled