Scenic route
GoldenPass Line
Montreux → Lucerne · Switzerland
GoldenPass Line in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 191 km
- Fastest time
- ≈ 5 h 15 min · 2 trains
- Average speed
- 36 km/h
- Top speed
- 100 km/h
- Operator
- MOB · BLS · zb
- Train
- GPX panorama + Luzern–Interlaken Express
- Countries
- Switzerland
- In service since
- 1901
- Highest point
- 1,279 m
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
Lake Geneva’s riviera to Lucerne over the Brünig Pass — two trains: the gauge-changing GPX to Interlaken Ost, then zb’s Luzern–Interlaken Express.
Zweisimmen has always been the awkward part of this journey: metre gauge arriving from Montreux, standard gauge leaving for the Bernese Oberland, and for a century everybody changed trains there. The MOB reached the village in 1905, four years after opening its first climb to Les Avants, crossing the Saanenmöser at 1,279 m through a summit tunnel just 90 m long. In June 1931 it tried to make the change worth enduring: with the Wagons-Lits company it ran the Golden Mountain Pullman Express, a genuine Pullman train on metre-gauge track, four new salon cars built specially for the line. The Depression was at its peak, the British and American visitors it was built for never came, and the service was withdrawn that September after a single summer — the carriages went to the Rhaetian Railway in 1939. The gauge break outlived it by ninety years, until the GoldenPass Express began changing gauge under way at Zweisimmen without the passengers getting out.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from 3 OpenStreetMap relations, their own nodes end to end: relation 19925707 (60 km), relation 1846736 (34 km), relation 2344785 (72 km) — 167 km of the route between them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: 94.9% of this line lies within 250 m of real track (median 11 m); the longest stretch away from it is 9.5 km
- The operator publishes this line's timetable: BLS — a place to look it up, not a check of our drawing
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- Lake Geneva terraces above Montreux
- Chamby spiral tunnel
- Jaman tunnel (2,424 m)
- Château-d’Oex and Gstaad in the Saane valley
- Saanenmöser summit (1,279 m)
- Gauge change at Zweisimmen
- Brünig Pass descent to Lucerne
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