Tag Archives: Train

Far Beyond the Average Train

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Shinjuku Station in Tokyo is the busiest railway station in the world. It carries multiple train lines, including the metro and an above ground railroad, and is used by an average of 3.5 million people daily. It has a subterranean shopping mall and street that stretches for miles. It is teeming with people and it seems impossible that chaos would not be pervasive here. But, this is Japan and Japan is super organized and super functional. So it works.

The metro is clean and logical, and once you get the hang of it, you can get from one end of this vast city to the other in no time. All signs use the Japanese and Roman alphabet so you can pretty easily figure it out even if you do not know Japanese. Getting tickets at the automatic kiosk is a piece of cake and there are so many people that seem to work at the metro who can help you that nothing seems impossible to figure out. So you will never feel stranded. Ironically, nobody really speaks English. The culture is kind and forgiving and they are pretty good at sign language.

And then there are the Shinkansen trains. The bullet trains. Faster than any train on the planet – they rule the train world. They are awesome to ride on plus they are frequent and always on time. They travel around 225 mph and transport you across Japan in super elegant fashion. Nobody takes flights inside Japan when it simply makes sense to just take the train. Imagine this…Boston to Washington is currently 8 hours on our Acela trains. But on the Shinkansen it would be 2 hours. It’s extraordinary and perfectly configured. First class has a green cross to mark the carriages. Second class is barely second class and feels like first class in any other country. The doors of the carriages pull into the station precisely in sync with the openings marked on the platform.

The trains stay for maybe a minute and then they are gone. But the next one arrives within four minutes. There are six trains to Tokyo from Kyoto within 24 minutes. There are different types of Shinkansen trains and the faster they are, the more extraordinary the front of the train looks. And guess what? They are building a new one, the Maglev, that should be ready shortly and it travels at speeds over 300 mph. So, Boston to NYC would only take 40 minutes! City center to city center. I had a dream! You can buy weekly train passes (7, 14, 21 day), called the Japan Rail Pass, in either first or ordinary class travel. They have to be bought outside of Japan and it’s a fantastic deal. Traveling by train in Japan is one of the highlights of traveling in Japan. And it’s about to get even better.

The Bento

Imagine the lunch that you bring to work every day. A microwavable pasta sauce, a Lean Cuisine, maybe your own concoction of carrots and hummus, or a granola bar. And then there is bento – Japanese lunch boxes. They are found practically everywhere in vending machines, but most impressively, they are found mostly in train stations where people race for the train and can grab their lunch box to-go. They are beautifully presented in colorful boxes with a perfect depiction of all of the amazing ingredients inside. They are almost too good to eat. Walking through a bento food stand and looking at the various options is almost as thrilling as eating them. There is eel, sushi, sashimi, chicken with rice and seaweed, roe, and noodles. You name it. All perfectly compartmentalized with the perfect sashay of soy sauce and wasabi (real wasabi) with a pair of chopsticks of course. Grab a drink and you have been fully “bento-nized”.

Bento boxes are different wherever you travel. Outside of Tokyo, the bento will represent the local cuisine and ingredients of that city or town. Then there are holiday bentos such as the specially prepared boxes for New Year’s packed with poached tiger prawns, root vegetables, roe, and chestnuts. A bento is an amazing meal. The origin of bento comes from Makunouchi which literally means “between acts”, as they were originally packed for a light meal to be enjoyed between intermissions of lengthy kabuki plays.

Exploring Scotland

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Taking the train to Scotland is always a bit of a highlight for me. It reminds me of a poem by W.H. Auden about the night train crossing the border to deliver mail. The poem has the meter of a steam train as it trundles along the tracks. I memorized it as a young kid and every time I go to Scotland and cross the border, I think of that poem.

Now the journey from London to Scotland by train takes around four hours on Britain’s relative high-speed network. But still the names of the stations bring back memories of the beautiful stretch of coastline literally at the border with long sandy beaches and, I recall, lashing rain. The accents changing by the half hour as the train moves through the midlands, Durham, Newcastle, and Berwick-upon-Tweed, before it heads inland for its final destination on the River Forth. Edinburgh.

Edinburgh and the Coast

I was heading to Edinburgh for a wonderful teacher reception with our fabulous group of clients who had spent a weekend in Scotland. Funny enough, I got to do two things that I had never done before – have a whiskey tasting and watch a bag piper play for Scottish dancers. Shame on me for not doing those sooner, it was fabulous and amazing. One of the members of our group, who had his own bagpipes, had always wanted to play on the shores of Loch Lomond. He got his wish and even got to play the pipes while somebody else was blowing the bag at dinner time.

Edinburgh is a great city and it’s a young city with its famous university. But we had decided to head off to St. Andrews instead and trace the tourist trail along the coast of Fife.

What a magical journey that was. In a matter of an hour, we were winding through fishing villages and charming tea shops, colorful houses and ancient harbors.

I walked along the sandy shores at the beautiful beach of Elie, around the harbor at St. Monans, caught the sunset at Pittenweem, and stopped at Crail before ending up at St. Andrews. It reminded me a little of one of those spectacular journeys along the Amalfi Coast. It was rougher, the sky was not blue, but the sunset and the colorful houses more than made up for the lack of warmth. And there was always haggis at the end if you fancied it!

Driving to Zermatt!

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The drive from Venice along the highway to Milan is fairly dull. After Milan is where the sights get interesting.

We took the highway above Lake Maggiore which was super fast and delightful. Mountains beyond the lake and the Borromean islands in the background provided for a great backdrop to our car ride. Pushing through, we started our ascent to Simplon. What a lovely day it was with blue sky and more snow than I have seen for years.

The Simplon Pass is very unique. An ancient hospice still maintained by a religious order offers basic accommodation to the devoted and dedicated skiers and kite boarders who ply their tricks on this unique snow playground. There is a great place for lunch at the top as well. Views of the boarders and surroundings provide entertainment. The descent is hair raising though!

Journeys end along the valley following the Glacier Express. We end up in a giant car park where we dump the car and hop on the train. Täsch in Switzerland is our last stop with our car. The cog train takes us the rest of the way into a dead end in the mighty valley. It’s snowing hard.

Jungfrau Peter Jones Pietro Place

The Journey up Jungfrau

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The journey from Zermatt to Lauterbrunnen, up Jungfrau, was a feast of Swiss mountains, green pastures, and alpine chalets.

The descent on the cog railway from Zermatt to Täsch was on the Glacier Express.  It was the first part of a journey that would take us around three and a half hours.  Our final destination was Zurich and in between we would climb the Jungfrau, stop in Wengen, and pass the magical town of Lucerne.  All of this within one day!

We were driving and so we had to figure out a way to successfully get from Tasch to Lauterbrunnen efficiently. The new Lötschberg Basistunnel is the answer. It is 36 km long. The train goes through the mountain with your car!   It is a fairly easy process.  You queue up, buy the ticket, and drive your car onto a long metal ramp of open carriages.  Put the brake on, turn your engine off, sit in the car, and watch the world go by as the train takes off.  Alps in the background, mountains looming, and then total darkness as you enter the tunnel!  25 minutes later you pop out the other side and you’ve just saved yourself four hours of driving.  It’s that simple!

Eventually we got close to the town of Interlaken (between the lakes) and parked the car in Lauterbrunnen to catch the train that would take us up to Wengen.  The train is a cog train and was full of skiers and tourists alike.  In Wengen, which is the staging post and midpoint, the town bustled with activity. It was full of hotels, cafes, restaurants, and is the beginning point for all of the lifts that will take you onto the ski slopes of the Jungfrau with the Eiger mountain in the background.  It looks like it has a decent nightlife and it is flanked by a number of open bowls so the light is good all day.  Many of the colors of the houses are yellow ochre and as the sun drops down the colors against the cog railway and the snow is stunning.  It is definitely a place you can hang out for a couple of days.

We changed trains, hopped on the Jungfrau cog railway, and before you know it we were headed up to the very top of Europe.  The train stopped inside of the glacier two or three times so that we could take pictures.  By that time we were already well over 10,000 feet!

At the Top of Europe, as they call it, we were at 11,782 feet.

Time for pictures and taking it easy as the altitude definitely affected your step.  I had a dodgy meal in the canteen at the top, experienced the highly civilized toilets and got to walk through the glacier ice village.  After we hung out for a while we caught the express train back to Lauterbrunnen.  At the top of the Jungfrau you can see the possibilities of skiing over to the open, broad expanse of Grindelwald.  The beauty of this area is that you can buy a pass that takes in the whole mountain….. and the skiing looked pretty good.  It may not be as extensive as Zermatt, but it looked awesome to me, especially if you had grown up skiing the ice in Vermont.

A coffee at the bottom, a jump in the car, and within two hours we would be in Zurich for dinner.

 

Glacier Express Peter Jones Pietro Place

The Glacier Express

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Switzerland offers a remarkable way to sightsee your day through the beautiful terrain: the Glacier Express.

No car needed. Just a slow moving, winding train that is Switzerland’s greatest ad for Narnia.

The Glacier Express is a regular scheduled year-round train service between Zermatt at the foot of the Matterhorn and St. Moritz in the Engadin skiing area.

No idea why it’s called an express since it is slow.

Built on a narrow gauge train, it takes over seven hours to cover just over 290 km (180 miles), at an average of around 24 mph.  However, it’s very civilized inside and you can get a decent lunch on board in the restaurant cars. The views are breathtaking, blizzards and all, and it also offers the unique experience of climbing to 2033 meters up the incredible Oberalp Pass, the highest point on the line. It truly looks like Narnia along the way. At the end the train magically winds its way to the chic resort of St Moritz. All in a day’s work!

Prices are not that bad for Switzerland. Below are the rack rates.

Zermatt – St Moritz, basic fare:  149 CHF (€149) 2nd class, one-way

 262 CHF (€262) 1st class, one-way
Glacier Express supplement:

(this must be paid in addition to

the basic fare or railpass)

  33 CHF (€33) in summer.

13 CHF (€13) in winter.
Cost of lunch (optional):  30 CHF (€30) for Plate of the Day.

43 CHF (€43) for 3-course lunch.

Children under 6 go free; children aged 6 to 16 pay half fare but must pay the adult supplement.

The Glacier Express is run jointly by two private Swiss railways, the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn (MGB) and the Rhätische Bahn (RhB), which also operate the regular hourly local trains over the same route.  There is one daily Glacier Expresses in each direction in winter, but up to three daily Glacier Expresses in the summer. It is a great experience and I highly recommend it.

You can easily buy tickets online at www.glacierexpress.ch