You are going to experience now two of the world's great train rides.
We’re going through Switzerland on the Glacier Express and then you'll take the Bernina Express,
traveling from one end of the country to the other.
“We’re riding on the Glacier Express from Zermatt to St Moritz.
It’s one of the most spectacular and scenic rail routes you can find any place in the
world.
It goes through something like a hundred tunnels, over three hundred little bridges, and mostly
it's this wild natural scenery with great mountains all around us and mountain streams,
glaciers in the tops of the mountains.
And it's a very comfortable ride on this Swiss train.
You can’t get much better than this.
It takes about eight hours to get from Zermatt to St Moritz.
You’re crossing almost the entire country of Switzerland, and it's eight of the prettiest
hours that you'll ever enjoy while traveling through Europe.
You see behind us the valley that has the town of Andermatt way back there.
We’re kind of at the crossroads of the eastern part of Switzerland and the western part.
The Gotthard Tunnel runs through this particular region and there are spectacular mountains
all around us.
We are riding along on the Glacier Express from one end of Switzerland to the other.
We got on in Zermatt in the morning and will be riding all day through some of the most
beautiful scenery in Europe, right through the heart of the Alps on our way to St Moritz.
The Glacier Express is one of the most famous train rides in the world and we’re finding
out why today.
There are beautiful mountains towering above us, we’re passing various river valleys,
the Rhône River Valley runs along much of the course.
You can't get hungry on this trip because they feed you very well, and plenty of your
favorite beverages to go along with it.
Real food cooked in their onboard kitchen and served to you right at your table.
They dish it out family-style with those big platters of food just coming out time after
time in, and giving you as much as you want to eat.
It's really quite a feast and made that much more delicious with that beautiful scenery
gliding by.
Notice the tall viaduct holding up tracks that lead into the tunnel.
One of the most famous sites along the Glacier Express.
The hours flew by quickly and this leg of the journey has come to an end.
Now we are ending up in St Moritz.
We will take the Bernina Express today, and everybody had a good time over there?
Yeah [cheers] Let's get back on the train.
Now we’ve got a change going, we’ve go to catch the train.
“We are on the Bernina Express in Switzerland.
This goes from St Moritz to Tirano in Italy.
Just on the southeastern tip of the country, enjoying some very spectacular scenery: mountain
peaks and beautiful valley bottoms.
We’ve seen some sheep and we've seen hikers out there.
Beautiful pine forests all the way along.
And it's a very smooth ride, even though it's pretty curvy.
The trip involves going up to 7000 feet elevation.
And it's quite a spectacular train ride.
There’s beautiful pine forests, snow-covered mountain peaks.
We have some misty fog now and then, and green valley bottoms, little streams, there's hikers
out there walking around enjoying the scenery, and all in all it's a wonderful two-hour ride
So we are in the very southeastern part of Switzerland right now, and while it is Switzerland,
they speak Italian here, and the architecture is Italian, and the cuisine is Italian.
It’s similar to the Ticino which is a large part of Switzerland by Lugano that's in the
Italian cultural area, even though it's within the country of Switzerland.
And were entering some very sharp curves here because were descending from Switzerland's
highest mountain pass into the lower valley, and the scenery is getting prettier and prettier.
We’re getting more Italian with each mile that we travel, and this ride is still very
smooth.
It's the steepest train ride in the world that does not use a cog railway system.
It’s what they call adhesion, where it’s just steel wheel on steel tracks.
And so to make up for the gradient there is a lot of curves.
In fact, the train itself travels twice as far as it would have to if it went in a straight
line because of all the curves that we are going through.
And the curves are kind of nice, they give you all the different angles on the scenery.
One moment the valley is out on this side of the train and the next moment it’s off
on the other side of the train.
You go into a tunnel and spiral around and come out the other way, and it's all a little
bit confusing but the at same time keeps things quite interesting and exciting.
We’ve been traveling through the Alps: Lucerne into Interlaken, enjoying the Bernise Oberland
and the Jungfrau.
And from there we traveled to Zermatt where we enjoyed the Matterhorn.
And then we crossed Switzerland on the Glacier Express to St Moritz and today is our final
leg, the Bernina Express from St Moritz down to Tirano.
We’ve come in a big circle all way around through the country enjoying a lot of Alpine
highlights.
I'd like to also tell you just a little bit about Switzerland.
It is such a wonderful place, and such a culturally rich place.
Now, the Swiss economy is pretty strong.
It used to be much stronger, but Europe in general is been going through a bit of hard
times in the last ten years.
Switzerland's a little bit better off than that because it's a strong mixed economy.
They do manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, of machine tools, precision tools, and of
course banking is critical, and export electricity.
They have a lot of hydroelectric power here in Switzerland, so much so they can export
nearly half of it to the adjacent countries, and as you realize, hydroelectric is a perfect
source of energy, no pollution.
And to the point where the Swiss are fed up with all these trucks rumbling through the
country that come from the north to Italy.
And they're building more tracks for trains, tunneling through the country, through the
Alps.
And they're going to want these trucks eventually to get on a train, a big flatbed freight train,
and pay a fee and be brought through their country on a train, and then they can get
off the train and pollute Italy if they want.
But they're so clean here.
You noticed very little graffiti.
The streets are clean.
Such an efficient country and friendly people.
Quite nice here and they speak English for the most part, certainly in the shops, I'm
sure you had no problem getting by there.
Education levels are very high.
They learn English in school from a very young age.
Maybe they learn French as well, since it's really made a bilingual country primarily.
And the education is free all the way through university, it's free education.
Teachers here, with some seniority, let's say ten years into the career, in the public
school are paid about a hundred thousand dollars.
It's really quite amazing how they value education.
And social services obviously come with that, too, welfare, medical, some housing benefits
if you're having a problem.
So we don't see many poor people here, and yet, there's a lot of rich people in Switzerland.
There's just a lot of money here.
Zürich is one of the richest per capita cities in the world.
And so, in general the Swiss have a high standard of living, in terms of just the comfort of
life.
All the indicators of well-being in a society.
But in Switzerland they have declined to join the EU and one of the main reasons for that
is that out in the countryside, they're conservative.
In the valleys, in the little villages, the little towns, they don't want to change, no
matter what.
The people in the big cities want to be part of the EU, the business, the corporations,
the politicians want to join the EU in general.
But they have direct democracy here, which means that villages can vote.
Cantons can veto any membership in the EU.
That's what happened.
They might eventually join, but as of now, uh-uh, and they're happy with that, with her
own currency.
Their economy is strong enough.
It's a great place.
We have a big series of movies about Switzerland taking you to most of the great places.
We will bring you to Lucerne and up to Mount Titlis, Mount Rigi, over to Interlaken, up
to the Jungfrau.
We will see the Shilthorn, Lauterbrunnen Valley, Trummelbach Falls, Grindelwald, Bern, then
on to Zermatt, the Matterhorn, yes we will have a look at the Gornergrat, up the Sunnegga,
do some hiking, show you the village then on down to Lugano and Locarno in the southern
part of Switzerland, the Ticino we also take you to the great city of Zürich.
Look for them in our Swiss collection.